However, researching the best systems, software, tools and other resources for social commerce campaigns can be exhausting and investing in the wrong place can potentially hurt a retailer. Here are a few essential technologies and some successful/highly rated systems and tools for the best possible social commerce strategy.

Blogs

Movable Type (MT) allows you to blog, manage large amounts of content, and can be quickly changed or rearranged to meet the retailer’s needs. MT does require some knowledge of HTML but can be designed to match your website completely. This system is recommended as a no-nonsense tool for businesses wanting to create a quick and professional blog site.

• Movable Type

Typepad is a popular system among businesses and made by Sixapart, the same company that created Movable Type. Unlike the other systems listed here, this platform is not free, but the monthly fee is small ($4.95-$14.95). Typepad is most famous for its feature Photo Albums, which allows retailers to display products in their blogs. For users to take full advantage of Typepad’s design templates, they will need a general understanding of HTML.

• Typepad

WordPress is easy to install and use and can be listed in Google within days of starting. This system is built for businesses with a large or fast growing online community. Also, for retailers who want a more complex system, there are several plugins and widgets available to use with this software.

• WordPress

Blogger, a blogging platform created by Google in 2003, is probably one of the most well known systems available. Blogger has sometimes been credited with bringing blogs to the masses because it doesn’t require any knowledge of HTML. This is a simple and easy system best recommended to beginners.

• Blogger

Social Networking

Facebook’s appearance on this list (as well as the next network) won’t come as a surprise to most retailers. With over 400 million users, retailers can’t ignore the potential for building a large and dedicated community. Businesses involved in Facebook can engage with consumers, make announcements, and get instant feedback from a committed fan base.

• Facebook

Twitter is considered a micro-blogging service as well as a social network and boasts over a 100 million users with 300,000 new users joining per day. On Twitter, customers can easily connect and companies can easily provide information about products and services.

• Twitter

Delicious makes bookmarking social and allows members to share their favorite sites with one another. Businesses can find loyal customers who will act as brand ambassadors. This site is a good way for retailers to connect with their customers and spread the word about products.

• Delicious

Ning is quickly growing as an alternative to other social networks that sometimes feel too overcrowded. This site allows users to create their own social network (or niche community) and create a unique space to bring customers, potential buyers, and vendors together. Retailers will have more control over the design of their network and can create the best space possible for visitors.

• Ning

Badoo, the European answer to social networking, is perfect for online retailers hoping to go global. Badoo has nearly 70 million users. This network offers many of the same features as Facebook and Myspace but reaches an entirely different audience that could potential expand business.

• Badoo

Ask and Answers

Bazzarvoice, a leader in social commerce, offers several tools to help companies engage with their customers. With Ask and Answer, customers can get the information they’re looking for directly from the company website. Also, the business can collect and use customer feedback to provide better service and decrease potential returns.

• Bazzarvoice

PowerReviews provides social commerce solutions to hundreds of companies and brands both big and small. Their popular tool AnswerBox lets consumers view popular and informative questions and answers along with the product. Potential buyers can get the information they need and the purchase process is uninterrupted. For more information you might also consider reading our recent interview on social commerce with Andy Chen of PowerReviews.

• PowerReviews

RateVoice allows customers to post reviews and comments on products and respond to other shopper’s feedback. This system promotes the sharing of opinions between consumers. The information also helps potential buyers.

• RateVoice

Social Recommendations

Loomia is a leader in recommendations and provides easy and personal solutions to businesses of any size. This system provides two types of recommendations. One gives shoppers a list of similar products while they shop, and the other tracks what the customer is looking at or buying and creates a more personalized experience.

• Loomia

Aggregate Knowledge offers “Discovery Platform” which gives retailers the ability to manage and personalize advertising through consumer data. The system gathers information from web users to help customers find products that will most interest them.

• Aggregate Knowledge

Choice Stream uses shopping data to create targeted product recommendations and advertisements and provide a unique experience for each customer. The goal of the Choice Stream system is to increase profitability and increase the number of returning customers.

• Choice Stream

Baynote is a recommendation system that prides itself on real time user behavior. They emphasize tracking referrals, questions, and the amount of time spent on pages to better understand the latest trends and patterns of consumers visiting a retailers site.

• Baynote

Social Shopping

Turnto lets consumers share ideas and opinions with each other about products and services and allows visitors to view these comments while exploring the retailer’s website. With this system, potential buyers are getting the right information from people they trust.

• Turnto

KickApps gives retailers the ability to engage consumers with user-generated content including video sharing, message boards, widgets, and much more. All of these features keep consumers engaging with and talking about the retailer’s brand.

• Kickapps

JS-Kit, also known as Echo, uses several features to gather and share what people are saying all over the web. Consumers can converse across social networks in real-time without leaving the retailer’s site. This is useful system for companies just beginning to build an online community.

• JS-Kit

Small World Labs provides several social commerce services including community building. This feature gives retailers the power to guide and moderate their online communities. Small World Labs can best help businesses managing larger online communities.

• Small World Labs

Conclusion

Preparation is essential with social commerce and having the best systems in place is the best way to get the most beneficial results. Businesses need carefully dig through information, contradicting opinions, and veiled advertisements to find what best works for them. Hopefully, if nothing else, this guide shows the complexity of preparing a social commerce strategy and encourages retailers to take thier time and find the best options.

PowerReviews was founded in 2005 by Andrew Chen and Robert Chea and is now considered to be a leading provider of social commerce solutions. The company has helped hundreds of retailers engage customers and build communities online. Internet Retailer included the company in 2009’s Top 500 Solutions Winner. Sites such as RadioShack, Diapers.com, TicketsNow, and Orbitz and many more are using customer reviews systems provided by PowerReviews.

PowerReviews AnswerBox Overview

42% of online shoppers have left a site without purchasing multiple products because they couldn’t get a question answered about just one of the products in their shopping cart.

AnswerBox connects potential buyers with customers and staff while they’re browsing products. This solution streamlines the shopping experience by giving consumers the answers they need without leaving the retailer’s website.

AnswerBox Benefits

• Credible answers from experienced customers and expert staff
• Creates a sense of community between new and loyal customers
• Increase conversion

AnswerBox Features

• Full Moderation: 100% control of content
• Multi-Pronged Response: a variety of informed answers
• Virtual FAQ: common questions of a specific product displayed directly on product page

PowerReviews Blog

InSite is a blog by PowerReviews where they share experiences and insights from the industry with anyone interested in emerging technologies and social commerce.

• Official PowerReviews InSite Blog

Andy Chen, PowerReviews Co-Founder, Answers 5 Questions About Social Commerce

I think a lot of small businesses are interested in social commerce but unsure how to put it into practice. What advise would you give to these eCommerce retailers?

First of all, get started. Social commerce is rapidly evolving, so it’s important that small businesses learn how to learn from, listen to and empower their customers in a meaningful way. The two social commerce tools that intersect both (a) proven and consistent ROI to the merchant; and (b) demanded and desired by the consumer; are Ratings&Reviews and Q&A (we call this AnswerBox), so this is where we would start. Building a “Community” (ala Yelp/Facebook) is further away and not yet a practical application for most businesses.

Are there any common mistakes or misconceptions businesses make when they first engage their consumers?

The “Build it and they will come” approach is a big mistake. Consumer engagement is difficult to create, and it’s important to put the right mechanisms in place to drive engagement. Therefore, PowerReviews always recommends a series of best practices to create awareness and engagement in starting a social commerce program… most importantly to focus on the merchant’s “recent purchasers“, who have the highest propensity to participate.

Reviews and ratings are one of the most popular methods of social commerce. What makes this method so effective? Why do you think people are drawn to reviews and ratings?

There are several trends driving the need and desire by consumers for ratings and reviews. Firstly, consumers have been trained for almost 15 years to seek out ratings and reviews when shopping online by the major eCommerce sites such as Amazon, Ebay, and Zappos.  Therefore, they EXPECT reviews as part of a complete shopping experience.

Secondly, consumers are smart, and understand that no products are right for all people, and that they cannot solely depend on manufacturer or retailer supplied product information. The voices that they trust to guide them to the RIGHT product are their friends and “people like them” (e.g. people with similar needs and lifestyles). Ratings and reviews fill that need exactly.

How can a reviews and ratings system help a small eCommerce business?

Surprisingly, we see that the impact of ratings and reviews are HIGHER for PowerRevews’ small business clients than they are for the larger, well-known companies. There are several factors, in my opinion, that drive this:

Firstly, small businesses typically have more of a specialty/niche vs. a big box feel. One of our clients, for example is Alpaca Direct, which only sells products made from Alpaca. This means that consumers on those sites are naturally more enthusiastic about the products, and often have very specific needs. Reviews from other enthusiasts help other shoppers become more confident that they are buying the “right product“.

Secondly, since small businesses are not as well known as the larger chains, reviews serve as endorsements for the merchant overall, in addition to the specific product. The message that the merchant can send by posting reviews is that “yes, lots of customers have put down their money, received a product, and were asked about their experience“, which is a tremendous confidence building tool that clearly separates the fly-by-night operations from the legitimate small businesses.

Allowing consumers to share ideas is not only valuable to potential buyers but it can also be valuable feedback for the merchant. How can a business best use and gather this information?

This is a fairly broad area, and perhaps one of the largest opportunities for manufacturers and retailers to get value from their social commerce programs. There is an adage in the usability or consumer research world use — “measure what they do, not what they say“. Therefore, PowerReviews takes the approach that the content within the reviews, or AnswerBox, content is where the most useful insights and ideas live vs. creating a separate solution to solicit ideas from customers.

Many of our clients are already using their data to drive powerful business value such as:

• Optimizing their inventory by returning low rated products to the vendors
• Driving their merchandising by highlighting top-rated products
• Understanding specific product flaws or gaps in their inventory
• Improving their product content based on feedback from customers

We support these insights in several ways:

• Our tag-based reviews allow our clients to quantitatively understand the customer feedback (e.g. we can easily understand the consensus around the pros, cons, uses, and buyer-types for each product… and compare them across the category). This is something that we had previously done by hand, or by unreliable natural language processing techniques…or not at all.
• We provide a “Product Suggestions” module (for free) as part of our ratings and reviews solution. This allows customers to provide their own ideas to improve the product after they’ve tried it for themselves. This is much more effective than a regular focus group, because these reviewers have recently purchased the product and are in the best position to provide thoughtful feedback.
• We moderate 100% of the content and flag any reviews that might be interesting to a merchant’s customer service, product, and/or merchandising teams.
• We provide detailed reports back to our clients that allow them to route the data to the appropriate category or brand-level business owner.

In a nutshell, we absolutely see how the underlying data from consumers can dramatically improve core retail and manufacturing processes in the near future.

Conclusion & Final Thoughts

A big thanks to Andy Chen of PowerReviews for taking to time to give some good advice to our readers.

I also want to thank Lisa Tarter of Tidal Wave PR for helping me put this interview together. Like many of our readers, I’m still learning about social commerce and I hope they found Andrew’s answers as beneficial as I did. A common theme that Chen and many others emphasize is the importance of retailers to listen to their customers. The value of the feedback from customers can often be overlooked. However, using it to evolve your business is one of the most important parts of social commerce. We’ll be posting a few other articles exploring social commerce soon so stay tuned.

Basically, blog, site or profile shoppers select products or items from the widget to add into the shopping cart, then they checkout and pay using PayPal. The idea for storefront widgets was suggested by PayPal users as a way for them to sell easily from MySpace profiles, Facebook profiles and more (Note: At this time, the PayPal Storefront is not available for MySpace, you can get notified when it is by clicking here).

Create your own online store with the PayPal storefront. Upload products, set prices, and start selling on your website or blog. Features include quick store setup, fast browsing, fast checkout and simple payment processing.

Here’s a sample Storefront Widget, items cannot be added or checked out from this example…

Here’s a quick rundown of new Storefront Widget features…

• Viral storefront distribution – Fans of a seller’s products can click on the “Help sell these items” link on the badge to copy the storefront HTML code for hosting on their websites. The storefront is an exact replica of the original and all orders and funds are securely delivered to the owner of the original storefront widget.
• Storefront display – Sellers can display thumbnail images of all of the items for sale through the storefront widget. When a buyer hovers over an item with the mouse, an enlarged view of the item is shown.
• Item navigation – If a buyer pauses while viewing an item, the other items in the storefront will rotate into view.
• “Sold Out” items – When an item is sold out, sellers can define whether the item is suppressed in the storefront or appears with the “sold out” label.
• “Store Closed” display – When a seller is not able to process orders, for instance, due to a vacation, the “store closed” sign communicates to buyers that while they may shop at the storefront, they may experience delays in receiving items.

Creating a PayPal Storefront Widget:

Before You Begin: Login and click “Create New Storefront” button

Go to the Paypal Storefront Widgets Beta page and login to your PayPal account using the appropriate email address and password. You will get redirected back to the PayPal Widgets Beta page and you will see that the “create new storefront” button is now not grayed out, and should be showing a yellow button you can click to begin step 1.

Create Your Storefront (Themes & Colors)

Simply select 1 of the 25 available themes or 1 of the 23 available colors for you to use on your new storefront widget. You will see the sample widget to the right of the theme and color chooser change as you go through the different colors or themes and select one or the other to try out on the widget.

Create Your Storefront (Title & Logo)

Simply type your company name or title text into the appropriate box, called ‘Store title’. Then enter the path to your store logo on the Web to a file location where you have a logo uploaded that is 60 pixels wide by 35 pixels high. After that, you can choose the color to change the store title text to if you want, or you can just leave it to default, which is black. You will see the example widget to the right change as you add the title, logo and title text color options.

Create Your Storefront (Store Policies)

Simply type your company shipping, contact and any additional store information you wish shoppers to view while buying from your new widget. When you update the information in the shipping, contact and additional policy sections you will see the example widget to the right update as well.

Create Your Storefront (Products)

First, you will need to configure the product settings for the widget. Simply select to show all products, currently selected product and alternatively you can choose whether to rotate your widget products every 3 seconds. Next, set the inventory configuration by selecting one of the choices for instances when the product inventory runs out or reaches 0. Choose either to show the product as sold out or to hide the product until inventory is restocked.

Next, you will need to figure out how many products you wish to offer through this widget. Product are represented by the ‘Sample’ images near the top of the product details and inventory sections. To add more products simply click the plus button and another ‘Sample’ image will appear. Each image represents one product, so you will want to make sure the first image in the horizontal list is highlighted before entering in information for the first item in your widget. To remove products, simply use the minus button next to the plus icon that you clicked to add more products.

Once the number of products are selected, simply enter in your product information for the first item including its product title, price, description and image path. Images should be 188 X 168 for best results. After that, you will need to click on the inventory tab next to the details tab in order to set the inventory for the product you just added, along with any additional notes about that item. Once you have finished one, click the Sample image for the next product and fill in the information for that item. You will continue following the same steps until all the Sample images are changed to actual product images and have the corresponding information under each item.

Create Your Storefront (Open or Closed)

The last step for creating your storefront asks whether you want to display the storefront widget as ‘Open’ to shoppers or whether you want the storefront to appear ‘Closed’. The closed temporarily choice has two other options including the ability to type a custom message to shoppers and a feature that allows shoppers to shop and place orders when the store is closed. Once you have selected one of the two choices and any alternate options, the store widget will reflect the changes and show shoppers an open or closed message, depending on what option you chose.

After Storefront Is Created: Click “Step 2 Update Your Storefront” and “Update Storefront”

To publish your new widget simply click “step 2 update your storefront” followed by the “update storefront” button. If something happens during the update or your widget gets accidentally deleted, you can still re-publish your storefront by clicking the corresponding anchor text in italics.

That’s it, you’re done. Simply grab the HTML and embed it into your blog, site or profile pages!!

We can’t promise that you’ll become a problogger, but we can get you started on the right path. Enter our ‘Become a Problogger Contest’ for a chance to win a prize package that will give you the TOOLS to help get you on the way to success. Good luck!

How MBL’s Contest Works:

Of course, there are official rules, so if you have any specific questions that aren’t answered here, you may want to check those out too. Also, here’s the page where MBL will display the most current contest standings so you can always see who the top 100 contestants are at any given time.

MBL is looking for communities that stand out, are vibrant and rapid-growing. Such communities benefit both the bloggers who post and also MBL. As such, in the contest, blog community owners will have a chance to compete against each other to see who can grow their community the most and the fastest between November 8th and 30th. The winner of the contest will be announced from the floor of PUBCon 2007 in Las Vegas on December 5th, and will also be announced on MBL’s blog.

Some of the most important official contest terms include…

1. The promotion is open to U.S. residents who are 16 or older, and is void where prohibited by law. You can register any time during the period that the contest is open. If you register after the contest starts, your growth will still be measured from the first day of the contest to the last day.
2. The full eligibility requirements are in the Official Rules. In particular, though, no sponsors or employees of sponsors, including Yahoo!, are eligible to win. If you’re ineligible, you’re welcome to participate for fun (i.e. to see how your community ranks against others in the contest).
3. Only valid joins will be counted. If any entrant is found creating multiple accounts in order to inflate their sign-ups, or in any way attempting to game the system, that entrant will be disqualified from the contest.

MBL Contest Prizes:

• One Year Pro MyBlogLog Subscription
• $500 Yahoo! Search Marketing Credit
• A 1-year membership to SEOmoz Premium Membership
• 1 Complete Blog Redesign
• One Year Subscription To Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind
• A Featured Community for the month of December at MyBlogLog
• An invitation to the invite-only blog gathering, SOBCon 2008, in Chicago

Current eCommerce Optimization MBL Stats:

• Family, Friends and Contacts = 357 contacts
• Community Memebers = 45 members
• Profile Viewed = 1506 times
• My Admirers = 8 admirers
• My Communities = 8 communities

How To Help Us Win & Win Yourself:

It’s simple, we are splitting the prizes with members who join, it could be you!!

Ok, so the title of this article pretty much says it all, obviously we would like you to help us win the contest, but not without winning yourself at the same time and possibly even helping out another fellow blogger in need. Let me explain.

Right now we have 45 community members on board. I have taken a tally of all the members currently on our community list. Any new members that join our MBL community from today on will automatically get put into a drawing we will have on the 30th of November for a split of the grand prizes the winner receives (posted again below). Yes, we will actually be sharing the grand prizes with some of the folks who joined our community and help us to win the contest. See who gets what below.

Proposed Prize Split & Even One For Charity:

Again, here are the prizes… and this is all dependent on the official rules or contest terms…

• One Year Pro MyBlogLog Subscription
• $500 Yahoo! Search Marketing Credit
• A 1-year membership to SEOmoz Premium Membership
• 1 Complete Blog Redesign
• One Year Subscription To Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind
• A Featured Community for the month of December at MyBlogLog
• An invitation to the invite-only blog gathering, SOBCon 2008, in Chicago

I am pretty set on using the SOBCon invite, the Pro MBL subscription as well as the featured community prize for December, but hey, I am willing to split the rest with loyal readers, fans and other bloggers who join our community from now until November 30th. That means, out of all the new users who join, we will be doing 4 drawings to divvy out the rest of the prizes offered. You could win a 1yr SEOmoz premium membership, a 1yr subscription to Yaro’s Blog Mastermind and even $500.00 to play around with on Yahoo Search Marketing.

For the complete blog redesign, I was thinking about helping out someone in need, so what I plan to do with that prize is not conduct a drawing, but rather nominate non-profit blogs and other deserving bloggers who could actually use the redesign and would appreciate it more than anyone else.

There you have it. A prize split and even one for a charitable cause (non-profit anyways). So all you need to do to be included in our drawing is to join our MBL community, if you haven’t already, by clicking the green ‘join my community’ banner on the right sidebar of every page on this blog (except the main page). You will need a Yahoo ID to login and you should be a blog author yourself, but not necessarily, as long as you have a MBL account.

We really appreciate your continued support and readership, I certainly think all of our readers are more deserving of all the prizes than us, but hey there’s a few we can’t give away, they’re just too good. So, as a compromise, we will just have to split the prizes and give one away to another deserving blogger.

Pronto.com recently made a couple of big announcements regarding their comparison shopping engine and social shopping community. The first is the addition of brand new product buying guides into their social community. The new guides are supposed to compliment features that are already included in the social shopping sections. The other announcement involves a contest Pronto is having called the Holiday Shopping Contest where contestants have a chance to win $2,000 in products from Pronto.com.

Here’s what Michelle Pae, Pronto’s Vice President of Product Development, had to say…

What makes Pronto.com unique to the industry is our focus not only on helping consumers find where they can buy certain products, but also in giving them the information they need to decide what to buy. This is especially useful during the holiday season. With our new Buying Guides and thriving social shopping community, we’ve assembled critical buying information from across the Web into one convenient place to make shopping easy and fun.

Pronto’s New Product Buying Guides:

Just in time for the holidays, Pronto has released their new product buying guides in order to compliment their already feature rick social shopping community. The Buying Guides provide the perfect amount of information for a number of different products including reviews, unbiased advice and helpful, category-specific facts, so Online shoppers can make educated buying decisions without having to become an expert on the items they want to buy.

This is a good move on Pronto’s end as a recent study conducted by Burst Media found that nearly half of consumer shoppers expect to purchase either a portion or all of their holiday gifts Online this year (50.7%), up from 37.6% in 2006. In addition to data about how much consumers buy Online during the holidays, the study also found that more than two-thirds (68.6%) of consumers shop Online and use the Net as a primary resource for product research. These new Buying Guides should pave the way as more to help shoppers dramatically reduce the time they spend Online shopping by providing them with the information they need to pick the perfect gift for any occasion or member of the family.

Currently, there are dozens of Pronto buying guides to shop from, with more being added each day. The guides do a nice job of covering products across many popular categories including baby, home and garden, electronics and entertainment. To access the Pronto Buying Guides, users only need to click on the links below the ‘Need Advice?’ column near the top right of each page once a product or category search has been performed.

Once a buying guide has been selected, customers will find the following information…

• The Pronto Pick –The recommended product in the category based on quality and value
• The Five – Five key points the shopper should keep in mind
• Shop Talk – Product-specific terms and descriptions that consumers should know
• Buzz – What’s hot right now
• Wallet Impact – What consumers can expect within their designated price range
• Experts Say – Additional opinions and advice from the experts

It makes me happy to see all the success Pronto has gained over the past year. They are really making big moves at the right times in the industry and should be used as an example of what to do when launching a new product or service Online. Pronto boasts that they are the Web’s fastest growing comparison shopping engine (CSE) with year-over-year growth of over 3100% and 5.2 million unique monthly U.S. users (according to comScore). Pronto is also the first site to have successfully fused comparison shopping with a full range of social shopping features that allow their users to rate products, interact with other members, write reviews and discover new products, brands or stores from other like-minded shoppers.

Pronto’s Holiday Shopping Contest:

Other big news at Pronto includes a holiday shopping contest they are having called, Pronto.com’s ‘Want It, Win It’ Holiday Shopping Contest, in which one Pronto.com user will have a chance to win $2,000-worth of their favorite products. The holiday sweepstakes will run from November 15th to December 15th, 2007. The sweepstakes winner will be selected by random drawing on December 20th and will win $2,000-worth of products off of their ‘Like’ list. To enter the sweepstakes, simply create a profile and ‘Like’ five of your favorite or most-wanted products, write five reviews, and invite five of your friends to join you on Pronto.com.

Be sure to read the Official Contest Rules, there are also Help Instructions.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two years, you’ve most likely registered an account with or have heard of Facebook. If you haven’t heard of or used Facebook, you should know it’s basically a social networking site that was originally developed for college or university students. Now Facebook has grown far beyond just student users and now hold one of the top positions in their niche and continues to be one of the most visited and used sites in existence today.

Ok, now that the history lesson is out of the way, we can jump into the article topic, new Facebook Ads. On Tuesday, during the Facebook Social Advertising event (where more than 250 marketing and advertising executives gathered in New York), the MySpace killer unveiled their new ad system called Facebook Ads. The social advertising system will allow businesses and entrepreneurs to connect with a wide range of users and target advertising or media to the exact audiences the business needs to attract (it’s basically a BIG word of mouth system for businesses and also for users to find new things). The new Faccebook Ads are designed to show users new businesses, brands and products through their personal networks and the trusted referrals of their friends.

Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, had to say about the new ad system…

Facebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online. For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation. And they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do. The core of every user’s experience on Facebook is their page and that’s where businesses are going to start as well. The first thing businesses can do is design a page to craft the exact experience they want people to see. Social actions are powerful because they act as trusted referrals and reinforce the fact that people influence people. It’s no longer just about messages that are broadcasted out by companies, but increasingly about information that is shared between friends. So we set out to use these social actions to build a new kind of ad system.

The Facebook Social Advertising event also featured partnership announcements wth senior executives from huge new ad partners including companies like Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Sony and Verizon. In total, over 60 major retail and Online brand partners were announced at the event. Those were just the major ones, in total over 100,000 new Facebook Ad pages went live on Tuesday.

Facebook Ads primarily consist of three parts…

• Businesses can build pages on Facebook to connect with their target audiences
• The ad system facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads
• The interface gathers insights into user’s activity on Facebook that marketers want to know

100,000 Facebook Pages Launched:

Facebook Pages allow users to interact with businesses and organizations in the same ways they can interact with other Facebook users or profile pages. More than 100,000 new Facebook Pages launched on Tuesday covering some of the world’s largest brands, area businesses, international organizations and music groups.

Similar to Facebook users, businesses can start with a blank page and add any pertinent information or ad content they want including, but not limited to, photos, videos, music and even Facebook applications. Application developers have created a wide range of apps designed to enhance Facebook Profile Pages or Facebook Ad Pages. Applications include tools to book reservations, provide reviews of restaurants, ticket purchases and even things like custom t-shirt creation apps. Companies that have launched applications include Fandango, iLike, Musictoday, OpenTable, SeamlessWeb, Zagat Survey and Zazzle.

Social Graph Distribution:

Advertising messages are distributed through the Facebook “social graph,” or the network of real connections through which people communicate and share information. When people engage with a business Facebook Page, that action will spread information about that business through the social graph.

Users can choose to become a fan of any business or can share information about any businesses with friends and act as a trusted referral. Facebook users can interact directly with the business through that business’ Facebook Page by adding user reviews, writing on a business “Wall,” uploading photos and in any other ways that a business may want to enable. These actions could appear in a users “Mini-Feed” and “News Feed,” which are two of Facebook’s popular products that allow users to share information more efficiently with their friends.

Social Action Advertisements:

Facebook’s ad system serves “Social Ads” that combine social actions from your friends, such as a purchase of a product or review of a restaurant, with an advertiser’s message. The social actions enable advertisers to deliver more tailored or relevant ads to Facebook users that can even include information from their friends so they can make more informed purchasing decisions. Privacy is important, no personally identifiable information is shared with an advertiser in creating a Social Ad. Facebook has always allowed their users to make choices about what data is shared, and with Facebook Ads they are extending that to marketing messages that appear on the site. Facebook users will only see Social Ads to the extent their friends are sharing information with them.

Social Ads can appear either within a user’s News Feed as sponsored content or in the ad space along the left side of Facebook.

Brand Recognition, Presence & Promotion:

Facebook allows marketers to gain valuable insights and metrics about their business presence and brand promotion on Facebook. “Facebook Insights” gives marketers access to data on users activity, fan demographics, ad performance and even trends that are designed to better equip marketers with knowledge to improve custom content on Facebook and adjust ad targeting as needed. Facebook Insights is a free service for all Facebook Pages and Social Ads.

Conclusion & Final Thoughts:

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out more information at the main Facebook Ads page. This is a great move on the part of Facebook as they continue to improve their site, grow their user base and develop new and useful tools to help the community of users connect. Any one who needs to attract certain audiences (especially college or university aged people) should consider using the new Facebook Ads as a regular part of their marketing strategy. It’s no secret, they have a huge amount of user’s and traffic and it would be silly to let an opportunity for your business to attract a good number of them go by.

I will be testing some things out and will try to report back here with as much new information as I get about the Facebook Ad System. Have fun building your pages and remember to make use of all the neat Facebook Applications that are out now.

Back-to-school season is over and it’s Halloween time now, so what better way to get into the spirit than to point out some of the trendy and unique ideas that other companies and eTailers are using to leverage linkers, social media and site traffic towards their seasonal campaigns or holiday promotions.

Clever Seasonal Linkbait Idea:

One clever idea I saw yesterday and the day before was a cool linkbait idea from the folks over at Get Elastic (they have been known to create these clever posts and linkbait ideas to leverage traffic to their eTail blog). Although they aren’t exactly eTailers, I thought the idea was still valid and worth a mention here, as many merchants can learn from what they did (as long as it’s applied to their business model or online selling niche).

The idea involves custom Halloween costumes and accompanying sketches of those costumes for some of the most influential Internet retailers and other large Online companies like Google. They came up with several awesome costume ideas, got a professional artist to sketch mock designs of them and had users vote on which were the best. The sketches were then ranked in order and even had 1st, 2nd and 3rd place runners up. After the large post with the top ten and runners up, Get Elastic released a completely crazy costume sketch of Larry Page and Sergey Brinn (Google Founders) dressed-up as a scary ‘Ghoul’gle’ for Halloween.

I thought this idea was so clever and creative that I couldn’t help but share with you all so I hope you enjoy and appreciate the effort and results these types of campaigns are capable of generating for nearly any type of Online business (if you did, be sure to Digg it or Sphinn it to help their efforts along). Not sure if there was any cost involved to hire the artist or whether it was a trade, but either way I am sure it was well worth the compensation. So many bloggers and social media posters are linking to that post and sharing it with others that I am sure their blog subscribers have grown up to double what they were getting a few days before that post was published. It’s one perfect example of seasonal linkbait and a clever holiday promotional idea.

Holiday Promotions & Unique Ideas:

Almost all companies can launch seasonal or holiday promotional campaigns. Even Carnival Cruise Lines offers a special Halloween promotion during the month of October 2007 and even last October. Their ‘Frightfully Fun’ cruise features Last years promotional efforts must have paid off big time, since this year Carnival announced the promotion with M&M’s, Coca Cola and others as this seasons partners.

And with the “Frightfully Fun” promotion, guests sailing with Carnival can enjoy a variety of fun-filled activities, everything from costume contests and Halloween-themed giveaways to scary movies, and, of course, trick or treating, with candies and other goodies from M&M’S. The “Frightfully Fun” promotion, which is also sponsored by Coca Cola, will be held on all Carnival voyages departing between Oct. 13 and 30, 2007. Guests sailing on Carnival during the period are encouraged to bring their costumes and they can compete for a variety of prizes during the always-interesting costume contest and parade.

This is a great idea and probably brings in a lot of business during the month of October (typically not one of the best months to take a cruise, depending on where you go). I thought this was a fantastic idea from the Carnival Cruise Company and they are doing a perfect job by announcing their promotions for others to link to and read about on the Web. Bravo guys on such a well executed holiday promotion two years running.

Cool Halloween Themes & Logos:

Caught wind of this earlier on Search Engine Land and found a few other examples of some cool holiday themes and logos that companies throw up as new holidays come around or as seasons pass.

The first example is from Ask.com, which posted their Halloween Front Page Preview for this year.

The second is from Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable who uses a cool Halloween graphic as his logo.

Third we have a Halloween Logo Contest by Zelixy.

Lastly, we show off a Halloween logo by Rebelscum for a contest they are having.

Practical Example Seasonal Linkbait:

Personally, I like to use lists. Quite frankly, they work well and they are usually easy to put together. Some seasonal linkbait ideas require a lot of planing and previous thought, other don’t require as much time and effort to launch. To me, lists cost the least amount of time and work the best, just my opinion. Obviously, there are many ways to attract an audience towards your seasonal linkbait, this is just my personal preference and what I choose to use an an example. I saw another good practical example of quality seasonal linkbait and top ten linkbait posts on Get Elastic this past month. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do, it’s packed full of insight into linkbait lists.

Since my blog audience ranges from merchants to industry colleagues I have to pick a top that will appeal to both. For this practical example I am going to use Halloween Costume Searches from 2007, which should appeal to marketers and eTailers, as on one end you have search stats for marketers, and on the other merchants can see how powerful niches like costumes can be if they are setup to appear in search engines correctly.

So here’s an example of a linkbait list I would do…

• Pirate Costume
• Master Chief Costume
• Tinkerbell Costume
• Fairy Costume
• Bumble Bee Costume
• Edward Scissorhands Costume
• Devil Costume
• Stormtrooper Costume
• Beetlejuice Costume

In 2006 the top nine costume searches were…

• Pirate Costume
• Darth Vader Costume
• Wonder Woman Costume
• Belly Dancing Costume
• Tinkerbell Costume
• Fairy Costume
• Batman Costume
• Dorothy Costume
• Gorilla Costume
• Beetlejuice Costume

Typically, I prefer not to use EVEN numbers for my lists, so for this example I chose to use the TOP 9 Halloween Costume Searches, rather than TOP 10, as reported on HitWise in 2006 and 2007. Extensive testing has determined that ODD number lists perform much better than lists that contain EVEN numbers in the title, in case you were wondering why I used 9 instead of 10.

Conclusion & Final Thoughts:

No matter how you draw in new users and potential buyers, it’s a good idea to follow what works. Lists, contests, logos, humor, controversy. They all have a place in social and seasonal linkbait ideas and, if used correctly, can increase brand recognition, order amounts, customer interaction and may even help entertain or retain users for longer periods of time (plays into bounce rate and length of visit statistical benefits).

A heads up to all social media marketing fanatics! Tomorrow there is going to be a Webinar, featuring Neil Patel, on ElasticPath’s eCommerce blog.

Here’s the details and a link to register for the event. Space is limited, so sign up right now!

The Secret of Social Media Marketing for Online Retailers
Featuring Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PDT

About Neil:

My Take

For those of you who have not yet heard Neil Patel speak, or if you are not familiar with him at all, here’s a little bit of information to catch you up. First, I consider Neil the poster boy of social media and social media marketing experiments. He has done more testing, more hands on experimentation and analyzed more data than any other single person that I know of. There are plenty of others who know lots of useful information about social media, but I consider Neil the guy who wrote the book on Digg, and other popular social sites. He has been banned, re-banned and locked out of some of the best social sites for being able to find loop holes, leverage other user accounts in attempts to “game” each system. I am not telling anyone to go out there and try the things Neil has, it’s just that he wouldn’t know nearly as much as he does without being able to find and expose social system weaknesses. He has also helped many sites better their spam policies and the ability to crack down on social media spam within their own systems.

Official Bio

Neil Patel is an Internet marketing consultant and the founder of ACS which was started in 2002. He has led Internet marketing strategies for small and medium sized businesses as well as top companies such as Hewlett Packard and Samsung. His experiences include search engine marketing, buzz marketing and social media marketing.

A Few Recent Videos Neil Has Done

For More Videos Featuring Neil Patel, Visit The WebProNews Video Blog!

Final Thoughts:

I am very anxious to hear Neil speak tomorrow and to participate in the ElasticPath Webinar. It’s always great to hear what Neil has to say, I’ve seen him and heard him multiple times in the past. One of my favorite things about Neil is he always comes up with unique commentary for each of his speaking gigs. So many speakers re-use or repeat a lot of their core content, not Neil. Between the Webinar and eComXpo going on I will be busy, so posting may be light. I will try to report on each of them when I can over the next few days.

Check out the Webinar and feel free to post comments about it on ElasticPath’s blog or below this post!

Note from eCopt: The Webinar Outline...

What is social media?

• Short definition by Neil.

Leveraging the Blogosphere:

• Create something worthy
• Find related bloggers
• Write them a short custom message
• If they write you great… if not leave them alone

Link Bait Creation Tips:

• Research what works and what hasn’t
• Create non-baity content
• Stay resourceful
• Sex up your content
• Have fun!

Leveraging Digg & Delicious:

• Add friends
• Participate in the community
• Submit content at 9 to 10 am PST
• Make your titles sexy
• Relate to the audience

Leveraging StumbleUpon:

• Add 200 mutual friends
• Submit stories from Digg
• Use proper tags
• Use the send to feature

Leveraging YouTube:

• Create fun videos
• Add tons of friends
• Build up subscribers
• Submit with proper tags
• Leverage YouTube’s features

Leveraging Facebook:

• Add tons of friends
• Participate in the community
• Create a viral application
• Advertise through other apps

Leveraging Wikipedia:

• Create an account
• Read their rules
• Edit 500 entries first
• Add your own entries and get away with spam

Shop.com has recently introduced several new features to their shopping portal and platform including a new shopping lifestyle blog (The Shopping Vine), a Facebook shopping application and gift registries for multiple stores. Shop.com hopes the new features will give customers more ways to shop and exchange information Online.

Shop.com’s new lifestyle blog features affordable apparel, fun gadgets, household items, recipes and simple tips to make running any household easier for homemakers and families. Shop.com experts contribute new blog posts 5 times per week which also features an inspirational quote, a Shopping Pick of the Week and the soon to launch, guest expert bloggers, surveys and polls.

The Shopping Vine is a lifestyle blog brought to you by Shop.com. We combine the ruminations from our dedicated staff of adroit shoppers with the expert commentary from guest bloggers to provide you with an online forum where you can read and share shopping tips for you and your family, vote on fashion trends, and more – with other readers.

Shop.com also developed a new Facebook shopping application, SHOP.COMpanion. It makes it easy for Facebook users to search Shop.com, add products to their wish lists, view their friends Shop.com wish lists and gives users the ability to share additional product information.

Here’s how to add SHOP.COMpanion to your Facebook profile once you have an account:

1. Click this link to go to the application.
2. Follow the standard Facebook application installation process per the instructions on your screen.

Adding SHOP.COMpanion to your desktop is as simple as two quick steps:

1. Go to Yahoo! Widgets and click on the Yahoo! Widgets 4 button. After downloading, follow the instructions on your screen, and the widget framework will automatically be installed to your computer.
2. Once the framework is installed, then download and install SHOP.COMpanion by going to this link.

In addition, Shop.com rolled out upgraded gift registries for its shoppers so they can find, create and manage their own gift registries by selecting products from hundreds of name brand retailers, the company says. Now, shoppers can sort by price, store, and name as well as locate other registries by name and state. Users can manage their own registries through filtered views such as seeing only what items have been purchased.

Here’s what Shop.com’s Mondy Beller, Senior Vice President of Marketing, had to say:

As online shoppers are becoming increasingly more efficient in communicating, connecting, and sharing online, we are constantly reviewing and updating our existing offerings as well as developing and testing new features to help our customers shop more efficiently and more enjoyably. We’re excited about our blog, our new desktop widget and enhanced gift registries and how these elements over time will help build communities for our shoppers.

Wow, with all these new gadgets, widgets and applications it’s shaping up to be a great year for both Online shoppers and sellers. We have seen at least two new shopping applications like the Shop.COMpanion and by the looks of the trend, it’s doesn’t appear that these will be the last. It’s becoming a more social Internet everyday. I can’t wait to see what developers and shopping data providers have in store for the rest of us next.

What do you think will become the next big thing in Online Shopping?

Shop.com is Featured as one of the comparison shopping portals on our Product Listing Guide!

ShopLocal recently bulked up their feature offering by adding in social community and networking capabilities for their users. The new social features include a profile page and the ability to search various product reviews, join community discussions on their Hot Deals and even track prices. The users profile can then be shared with the rest of the ShopLocal community.

Once a user has signed up for their free profile account, they simply login to begin personalizing their ShopLocal profile and personal shopping experience. Community members then use their account to share deals, promotions, rebates, coupons, reviews and more within the network of users. In addition, ShopLocal members can get Price Alerts that inform shoppers when products they are interested in are available at a price specified by the user.

Here’s what ShopLocal’s CMO, Bob Armour, had to say about the new social features:

Since consumers are the ones on the front lines of shopping, we are inviting them to use our site to share their experiences along with feedback on products and special deals. The beauty of this type of online sharing is that it is truly unbiased and creates a very friendly, interactive shopping network.

ShopLocal also added a new site section which displays all the most talked about and reviewed products. The page is designed to show shoppers which products are being reviewed most often and which items consumers are buzzing about most at the time.

In addition, you can even grab the ShopLocal Google gadget which can be added to iGoogle or Desktop and gives users the ability to enter their ZIP code and a search term allowing them to receive updates on local deals and product information straight from their iGoogle homepage or desktop (using Google Desktop).

(Note: I tried downloading and finding the gadget and although there is a page for it and Google once knew about it, I can’t seem to find and download it. It may be down for development, who knows. I will report back if I find out anything more on their gadget.)

ShopLocal is Featured as one of the bargain shopping portals on our Product Listing Guide!

We have posted about Pronto several times before. If you are not already familiar with who they are, a good place to start getting to know them would be the interview we conducted with John Foley of Pronto. They also recently announced a partnership with ScanAlert that we covered. Lots going on over at Pronto.com, their team must be exhausted.

Today, Pronto.com not only has a new tagline, “Shopping Gone Social,” and logo but they also announced that they are now the first comparison shopping engine to enter the social shopping space with the launch of new community features that allow users to rate products, interact with other users, write reviews and gain insight from trusted peers and other like-minded shoppers.

Pronto.com is approaching online shopping in an entirely new way – Already the Web’s fastest growing comparison shopping site with over 3.1 million unique monthly U.S. users, Pronto.com is changing the Online shopping model by becoming the first to fuse comparison shopping with a full range of social features.

Pronto already provides consumers with access to over 70 million products from over 65,000 merchants directly on Pronto. With the launch of new social tools, they have become the only comparison engine that helps shoppers weed through all of these product choices by allowing them to express themselves through the products they like, want and own, therefore helping others make better, more informed shopping decisions.

Here’s what Pronto CEO, Dan Marriott, had to say about the new social shopping features:

Traditional comparison shopping engines provide advice on WHERE to buy products, but do little to help users decide WHAT to buy. At the same time, existing social shopping sites fall short by relying on users to gather products from across the web for them – which dramatically reduces the number of products available to the community. The new Pronto.com combines the best of social software and product search into an online shopping community that has not existed until today so consumers can visit one destination for the most fully informed shopping experience.

Pronto.com’s new social shopping functionality includes:

• User Profiles – Users can create personal profiles consisting of their favorite products, brands and stores as well as personal pictures and answers to profile questions.
• Brand and Store Level “Likes” – Users can express their interest in particular brands and stores in addition to their favorite products, providing other shoppers greater insight into their tastes and style.
• Lists of Top Liked Products – Users can quickly see the most popular products in a category based on the number of people who noted that they “Like” the product.
• Social Networking – Registered users on Pronto.com can invite their friends to join their personal network so that they can share knowledge and opinions on products.
• Peer-to-Peer Messaging – Users can communicate with each other via private messages to discuss products, brands and stores.
• Local Filtering – Users can track the hottest trends in their city by searching the most “Liked” products by region.

Pronto has been testing some of these features for over a month now, but this is the first big announcement about the inclusion of social shopping features into the comparison shopping engine. I look forward to seeing what Pronto puts together in the future. For now, they have certainly made a mark and my guess is that this is just the beginning for them. Kudos for being the first comparison shopping engine to enter the social shopping space, job well done Pronto!

Pronto.com is Featured as one of the comparison shopping engines on our Product Listing Guide!

Lemonade’s eCommerce for everyone, is a social shopping network, product recommendation engine, Online merchant marketplace and shopping widget creator that launched today. The South Norwalk, Conn company just unveiled the official press release called Lemonade Inc. Launches First Application on Facebook that Allows Users to Make Money after many months of testing. Lemonade is bringing back the old time lemonade stand with their own eCommerce shopping widgets for blogs, MySpace pages, Facebook profiles and more.

Users can create their own shopping widgets to include on their sites. The widgets display items that users choose to recommend from their social network pages. Once a user has created their widget, added items to recommend and add it to their profiles, Lemonade will share a portion of the revenue with the Lemonade widget user. When visitors to your profile page, blog or site take advantage of products and offers featured in your stand you get a commission on the sales. As soon as your account reaches the minimum balance you receive a PayPal payment from Lemonade.

Beyond 35 million Facebook users, the Lemonade Stand application is available to an estimated 100 million people who have created their own blogs, social network profiles and other personal web pages or profiles across the Net.

In addition to Facebook, Lemonade Stand owners can add their stand as a widget to their social networking page, blog, or personal site. Users currently have set up Lemonade Stands on MySpace, AOL People Connect, Yahoo! 360, Blogger, TypePad and SixApart. Lemonade Inc. will also feature every Lemonade Stand in the Marketplace section on www.lemonade.com.

Here’s what Lemonade co-founder and CEO, Tom Zawacki, had to say about the recent launch:

For many of us, setting up a neighborhood lemonade stand was our introduction to entrepreneurship. In a similar way, Lemonade allows people to combine commerce and community in the digital neighborhood of their personal online space. Certainly we expect people to set up Lemonade Stands to make money for themselves. However, we’re very proud of those users who are setting up stands to raise funds for a local cause or to donate to their favorite non-profit organization. Time Magazine named 2006 the year of consumer-generated content on the Internet. We hope to make this the year of consumer-generated commerce.

Lemonade Stand owners can select from among 2 million products carried by more than 200 top-tier retailers including:

• Apple (iTunes & Mac)
• Macy’s
• Wal-Mart
• Nordstrom
• Zappos.com
• Land’s End
• EBGames
• The Sharper Image
• Hotwire Travel
• eLuxury
• Liz Claiborne
• TigerDirect Electronics
• MovieLink

Here’s what Lemonade Chief Strategy Officer, Tim Smith, had to say about the recent launch:

We’ve worked very hard to make sure we offer broad retail category coverage for Lemonade Stand owners. Our goal is for everyone to set up a Lemonade Stand featuring the products or brands they love. We’ve already seen a variety of stands promoting video games, downloadable music collections, urban fashion, and baby products recommended by new mothers.

In contrast to other social shopping and recommendation services, like Kaboodle or ThisNext, which allow users to post images of favorite items on their profiles, Lemonade pays the user every time someone clicks through to the retailer’s page to buy an item.

Through this semi-affiliate approach, eTailers pay commissions of 5 percent to 15 percent of the sale price to anyone who delivers a paying customer. Lemonade will keep 20 percent of the commissions on behalf of people who create Lemonade widgets, and will pay users the rest of the money. Some eTailers also pay up to $10 for each new customer, while others may just pay Lemonade users each time visitors click on a link to see recommended products. (Users are still paid commissions if they buy from their own Lemonade stands but will not be paid for simply clicking on links.)

Lemonade has taken a fresh new approach to social shopping and product recommendations and looks to make a their mark by being one of the first to pay users for participating within the Lemonade Stand program. I think this type of service will get much use from younger generations and will have a harder time reaching out to older demographics and Internet oldies, but there is potential. If Lemonade can acquire new strategic partnerships with many more eTailers, there may be a wider use from both younger and older Online generations. This means a bigger user-base for Lemonade and a wider expansion of social network users. I look forward to watching Lemonade and seeing where they end up in the space. It appears as if they are off to a good start and certainly made a smart move by tapping into the huge Facebook user-base to begin with, but not leaving out blogs and other social places. Let me know what you all think, whether they should add anything or any other thoughts. Don’t forget to build a Lemonade Stand too!

Here’s a Video with the founders I found on WebProNews Video blog:

We will be adding Lemonade Marketplace to our Product Listing Guide, so keep an eye out for it over there in the future.

Walmart has started their own Facebook Group, called Roommate Style Match, for college students. The Facebook Group is meant to target college students for the upcoming back-to-school season. Walmart hopes that by promoting their products through Facebook’s social media site that it will help to bring in more business from younger consumers for this years school season and back-to-school shopping in the future.

According to a study conducted last year by the National Retail Federation, the average first-year college student spent $1,112.62, mainly on electronics and home furnishings.

The Roomate Style Match Group launched on Wednesday and is due to stay active through the end of October. Users who have joined the new group simply take a brief quiz to determine their decorating style, get a list of Walmart recommended products and then they can buy those items at Walmart to mesh their own unique style with their roommate’s style. Group members can also download a shopping list of dorm room products sold at Walmart stores or Walmart.com and link to Walmart’s earth-friendly items.

We realize that this is an audience that we need to be talking to, and that this is a channel we need to be on. Facebook has 34 million active users, which it defines as users who have logged on in the past month, and he said approximately 40 percent of its users are in college.

Back-to-school shopping begins in the summer months so retailers like Walmart are bulking up for this years school shopping season in BIG new ways. It has been reported that many eTailers fear that higher gas and grocery prices may affect this years school shopping season and cause students or parents to shop less locally and buy fewer items than in years past.

The new Facebook Group launches just a month after Walmart announced their new Site to Store program aimed at users who want to purchase Online and pick up their items in a Walmart store a no additional cost to the consumer. Walmart representatives expect to see a lot more students buy their back-to-school products in Walmart stores, on Walmart.com and through their Site to Store program due to the Roommate Style Match campaign and other marketing campaigns aimed at back-to-school students.

Makes me wonder when other major retailers will join in on the Facebook fun? Target, Dell, Macys, they could all learn a thing or two from Walmart.

Buy.com introduced it’s new Facebook application for auction based sellers called Garage Sale. The announcement came a few days ago via the Buy.com Press Release. The new auction application is designed to let Facebook users run auctions and sell products from their business and social networking Facebook pages.

Garage Sale allows consumers to become personal online retailers using the backing of a major Internet company like Buy.com. With this embedded e-commerce capability, we see tremendous growth opportunities in providing the millions of users on business and social networks with an alternative to eBay and the ability to transform their personal profile pages beyond information-sharing.

Now, Facebook users can sell products and consumers can buy goods directly from the users profile page. Buyers won’t ever have to leave the page to complete their purchase and payment transaction. Garage Sale consumers no longer need to pay listing charges associated with online auction sites, and they can take advantage of significantly lower individual transaction fees.

Current Facebook users can add the Garage Sale widget to their pages from Facebook’s application suite. Users then upload necessary product information, including photos and begin selling on their profile pages using Garage Sale’s secure transaction capability. Right now, the Garage Sale application is only available to Facebook users, however, Buy.com plans to expand the service to users on other social networks in the near future.

To help Garage Sale users promote product sales, Buy.com is adding a special tab which will provide a complete marketplace for independent sellers to utilize Buy.com’s shopping marketplace and product platform.

The Garage Sale platform is based on patent-pending, embedded, e-commerce technology that Buy.com acquired earlier this year from Shoperion Inc. Buy.com also will use the Shoperion technology to enhance Buy.com�s advertising on third-party sites with the addition of checkout functionality incorporated directly within the advertisement.

The new My Shopping application for Facebook has been getting a lot of attention lately and I felt compelled to at least mention it on our blog. I am one of the users who welcomes time saving applications for shopping purposes and we have also recently added SecretPrices to our Product Listing Guide, so really there is more than one reason for us to post about the new app.

This new shopping application is a great way for Facebook users to connect with the Shopping.com and Amazon product databases. Registered Facebook users can now add a shopping portal powered by Shopping.com to their profile page. This all happened on Friday and since then, 375+ Facebook users have used the My Shopping application. That’s a tremendous response from the user base at Facebook, nice job Marc and team!

My Shopping is designed to let users search millions of products, link to buy pages of retailers, rate and mark items they’ve purchased, and earn commissions when visitors to their profile page purchase items mentioned on the page.

Be sure to check out the Nextgenerationshopping.com blog for more interesting insider information, news and screenshots on the new Facebook Shopping Application.

Other than SecretPrices, the only other company that has integrated a shopping app is eBay. eBay recently launched it’s own service, called To Go, for integrating into social networking sites, blogs and other sites. eBay hopes this will help influence more users to visit eBay.com and utilize their auction service.

(Visit this example blog to see To Go in action)

The shopping application age is here folks. If there was ever a time to join the bandwagon, it’s now! Be sure to share these apps with your friends and other Facebook/eBay users who may not know they exist. After all, the whole point of using social applications within the shoposphere is to share them.

A recent survey conducted by J.C Williams, a Toronto based eTail consulting firm, found that Canadian shoppers are more likely to use social media communities, blogs, user reviews or social shopping networks before making an Online buying decision. The company took a poll of about 2,000 Canadian shoppers which found that 60% preferred using user reviews or social recommendations over 31% that preferred using more traditional media outlets such as magazines, newspapers or other print advertisements.

The survey also found that Canadian shoppers are more likely to actually post a product review, write a comment or upload a video or recommendation on an eCommerce site. In addition, Canadian shoppers are also buying more Online than past years and have a tendency to use comparison shopping engines more often than US shoppers. It is apparent that shoppers in Canada visit more sites before actually making a purchase.

The average Canadian shopper now spends about $454.00 each year shopping Online, up from about $445.00 in the past year. 38% of Canadian buyers will visit more than one site before buying, up from 34% last year. 37% use search engines to locate eCommerce sites, up from 33%.

Stats and information via Internet Retailer

In the past, most average merchant sellers have had to rely solely on main stream search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, in order to get the kind of high-end exposure needed to drive large amounts of targeted traffic to an eCommerce enabled site. The recent buzz and overwhelming success surrounding eCommerce and selling online has led to many new merchant faces within major online niches and continues to grow with each passing day. The amount of small to mid-sized eTailers has tripled compared to past years and industry analysts don’t expect to see a change in that trend any time soon. Many of the larger, fortune 500 sellers will not be affected as much as the mom and pop sellers since the fortune 500′s tend to rely more on brand recognition and existing customers to continue growing their companies.

The extreme saturation within traditional search engines has made it difficult for many eCommerce start-ups to compete fairly within a given niche. These results are evident, especially if you are one of those merchants who are finding it more difficult to increase sales now than in past years, despite making few changes within your marketing strategy. This continuous growth contributes to an already over saturated, highly competitive marketplace to list the products you hope to be found by potential buyers who shop using traditional search engines. The chances that large amounts of buyers will find new eCommerce stores right away in saturated search results is slim and that’s why merchants shouldn’t rely solely on listing their stores in traditional search engines, expecting that one tactic to propel their business to the next level (although it can and I have seen it happen on many different occasions, just don’t count on it right away). Instead, post your catalog on alternative product search engines such as Google Product Search, Yahoo Shopping, Pricegrabber, Shopping.com, Shopzilla and many more.

Do I expect you to stop using traditional search engines all together? Of course not. I am simply stating that to keep up with trends, and in order to overcome potentially loosing sales to new competitors, you will need to research alternative methods for driving customers to your online store. The alternative locations you choose to list your products in will greatly depend on what you sell and who you are targeting as buyers, but may include places like comparison shopping portals, special deal or bargain finding sites or sharing items through social shopping networks, wikis and buyer guides.

Main Differences Between Search Engines & Alternative Product Portals:

Did you know that shopping engines aren’t the only places, other than search engines, available for merchants to list their store items? Many of todays eCommerce marketing firms will stress how important it is to get listed within comparison shopping engines, but forget about all the other places currently available for online sellers to gain additional exposure for the products in their catalogs. Not only are there many more options today compared to the past, but each one has it’s own individual benefits and is capable of catering to certain smaller niches within larger online marketplaces. These smaller niche portals are less competitive, less saturated and can even send more referral traffic than some of the traditional search engines (I get more traffic from social shopping sites than I get from Yahoo and MSN combined for two of my sites).

Main differences can include, but are not limited to the following:

• Less merchants selling in your niche or selling the same types of items
• Less items related to yours so you don’t get buried deep within results
• Visitors are more likely to buy coming from a shopping site
• Allows you to get more exposure at a cheaper end cost to you
• Helps increase link popularity if listing on sites with indexable pages
• More targeted audience that is already looking for the items you sell
• Increases brand awareness and helps to establish your name as an authority
• Capable of sending more traffic than traditional search engines like Google

Below I have outlined 5 main types of product and shopping portals that can be used as alternative places to list merchant catalogs and gain additional visitors and sales. In addition, I have provided examples for each of the different classifications that should help introduce you to a whole new world of product price comparison, bargain deal and social shopping sites.

Product, Price, Brand & Seller Comparison Shopping Engines:

Example: Google Product Search – Search for Stuff to Buy (More example CSE’s…)

These sites are considered the most popular out of the different classifications. Examples include places like Google Product Search, Yahoo Shopping and Shopping.com. Most eCommerce marketing companies and merchants use comparison shopping engines within their marketing and optimization campaigns. Features include product comparison and ability to sort by price, brand, seller and even by seller rating or review score. The majority of these shopping sites allow merchants to upload products via data feeds for easy implementation, especially for sellers who offer many products within their catalog. Whether you are just starting your first online store or you have been selling for years, it is good idea to include use these portals and comparison engines as part of your online marketing plan. At the very least, try to pick the most popular or free sites to get started with and expand as your budget allows.

Deal Finders, Bargain Hunter & Discounted Shopping Engines:

Example: SortPrice – Compare Lowest Prices (More example deal finders…)

These types of sites are good sources of traffic, especially if you sell many sale or discounted items as part of your eBusiness. Examples include places like SortPrice and DealBundle. Many merchants are not aware of sites like these and are potentially missing out on a great source of traffic and links. Bargain finders are visited heavily by many users each day and it is no secret that savvy shoppers search online for the best prices instead of buying from the first store they encounter. Features include price comparison, seller comparison, hottest buys, store sales, new items, shopping trends and much more depending on which one you are using. If you are currently not using deal and bargain portals within your strategy you should seriously consider trying one out. There are many benefits to listing in these places, but the two that come to mind are targeted traffic and links.

Social Shopping, Product Sharing & Recommendation Engines:

Example: ThisNext – Recommend, Share & Discover Great Products (More example social networks…)

These sites have been popping up over the past couple of years, but as social media and sites like MySpace and YouTube began to get popular so have the smaller niche social networks. Online shopping is one of the biggest marketplaces, so obviously developers and entrepreneurs saw a need for social shopping networks. Examples include places like StyleHive, ThisNext and Crowdstorm. Recently we have seen a huge increase in the amount of users who visit product recommendation and sharing engines. Features include the ability to list, share, rate, review, recommend and showcase your favorite products. Many of the sites allow you to uniquely share and collaborate with other users who have similar item taste and interests. There are a variety of ways to interact depending on the sites you use, however popular methods include being able to post widgets and favorite items on your blog or site. If you haven’t explored the ways to leverage these sites into your marketing strategies I urge you to register and participate. These portals are a great way to increase visibility, links, traffic and product awareness. It’s a great way to boost brand recognition and get the word out about featured items, new products or special deals.

Shopping Wikis, Buyers Reporting & Shopping Guide Engines:

Example: ShopWiki – Smart Shopping Starts with Wiki Buying Guides (More example shopping wikis…)

Wikis are a popular software chosen for sites that need to make it easy for many users to collaborate and edit pages with information about topics of interest. Wikis are rather new to eCommerce and the shopping community, however there are a few that are currently revolutionizing the product wiki and buying guide marketplace in a big way. Examples include places like ShopWiki and ProductWiki. Shopping wikis make it easy for merchants to list items or post information about a particular product or category. Many merchants aren’t aware of sites like these, but hopefully with the increased popularity of Wikipedia, they will become a bigger part of merchant marketing campaigns in the future. Now is a good time to begin using shopping wikis since they are typically less saturated, send targeted traffic and provide a good link back to your store. Popular features include the ability to post products, create buying guides, edit other users’ shopping guides and participate in what others think about the types of product you sell. I urge you to experiment with creating buyers guides and using wikis as part of your marketing efforts.

Consumer Reviews, Product Ratings & Consumer Guide Engines:

Example: ePinions – Read Product Reviews, Ratings & Opinions (More example review sites…)

These types of sites help shoppers during the buying process and can help determine what they think about the items before they buy. Examples include places like ePinions, PriceTool, Consumer Search and more. Users typically post an item and add a review or they can review products that are already posted. Features include the ability to compare reviews, share reviews, rate or score products and much more. Many of these site feed reviews from consumers to popular comparison shopping engines like Shopping.com. Many merchant sellers are not aware how much reviews affect their brand and store sales. At the very least, it is a good idea to monitor any reviews for products you sell. Consider adding the ability for your customers to review your products or optionally you can research adding third-party reviews via data feeds.

Conclusion & Final Thoughts:

Finding alternatives to the major comparison shopping engines is important if you expect to gain the kind of exposure, visitors and sales that have led to the success of past eTailers. The general rule is, put your products in as many places as possible that your customers are and your competitors are not. By listing your items in these places you will get more exposure, more links and it helps make your brand more recognizable among users looking to buy what you sell. It is a good idea to know the differences between the shopping and product listing sites available to submit your products to. Try to find as many as possible that fit well with the products you sell. Start with the major comparison shopping engines and then begin adding your products to all the other alternative product engines including deal finders, bargain deal, social shopping, product sharing, shopping wikis, buyers guides and consumer reviews or rating portals. Be sure not to add any items to sites that don’t fall within their guidelines and never spam the product engines. Good luck, hopefully you increase sales, traffic and links to your store.