Is 2012 the year of Social Commerce?

We’ve been hearing talk for months about the rise of social commerce, and how social networks like Facebook will be our go-to point of call for online shopping. Perhaps 2012 is not the year, given that some of the largest American retailers have launched and subsequently quietly shut down their Facebook shop fronts. Does F-Commerce stand for Fail-Commerce? This recent article on Bloomberg seems to think so. JC Penney, Gamestop, Nordstrom and GAP have all shut the doors on their F-stored, making us all re-think our ideas on what social commerce strategies should look like, and not merely implementing them because we can.

Of course retailers are looking to convert their Facebook fans into sales, but simply uploading your full e-commerce offering into Facebook is not social commerce. It’s commerce within a social network. So rather than plonking everything you’re offering into Facebook just for the sake of it and hoping it’ll work, what a lot of companies have been doing is integrating social features into their own e-commerce websites and reaping the rewards this way. A great example that I came across recently was KLM’s “Meet & Seat”, where passengers can link their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles to the flight they’ll be on, in order to see who else is on board, and decide who you want to sit with – long before the flight leaves the ground. Here is a video explaining how it works:

While not strictly “social commerce”, KLM is giving us a great example of how social functionalities can be integrated into product and service offerings in order to enhance the social experience for the customer. Facebook stores are not going to go away, and I’m sure the big-wigs over in the US are working on a new strategy to keep big brand retailers interested in selling through the platform. What is clear is that there is more than one way to go about socialising e-commerce. It’s not that F-Commerce is a failure, but at the moment the successful companies are those that bring the social features of Facebook and embedding them in their commercial website.