Take that Forrester!
From Social Commerce Today:
F-Commerce, the use of Facebook to assist in the buying and selling of products and services, is new, controversial, and next to group-buy, the hottest thing in digital retail right now.
We’ve been summarising the state of the f-commerce nation in the last few articles, and today we’ve put together a starter list of publicised f-commerce success stories from named companies for you…
Of course, the standout case comes from event ticketing site, Eventbrite, with some useful numbers (every social commerce initiative needs its own Tamara Mendelsohn), but there are others. If you have any examples of named f-commerce success stories – whether on-Facebook or off-Facebook (web-store, in-store), let us know, and we’ll add it the list.
Ticketmaster: Every time a user posts on their news feed that they’ve bought a ticket from Ticketmaster, friends spend an additional $5.30 on Ticketmaster
Eventbrite: Every Facebook share generates $2.53 in ticket sales (DPS – dollars per share (ie RPS (revenue per share)) – or in shares to sale = 24 – i.e. number shares needed to generate a new sale (based on latest av. ticket price ($60)) 24 shares generate 1 new purchase (and 11 visits to eventbrite.com)
In a recent update to their gold-standard analysis (by marketing director Tamara Mendelsohn), Eventbrite found some interesting twists in the dynamics of social commerce – they installed the Facebook “Like” button (the lowest-friction social sharing tool on the web) on pre-purchase pages, but on order confirmation pages they installed higher-friction but stronger “Publish to Facebook” tool.
Eventbrite found that a “Like” generated $1.34 in sales (thus 45 likes generates 1 new sale (av. sale price of $60))
Secondly, Eventbrite experienced more sharing post-purchase than pre-purchase (60% vs 40%), indicating that motivation to share is higher post purchase – despite being more onerous (for explanation, see here on loss aversion and the “endowment effect“. Furthermore, the share rate varies pre- and post- purchase – the ‘Browsing Share Rate’ (pre-purchase) is 1%, whilst post-purchase (transaction share rate) was 10%. People are 10x more likely to share post-purchase
Moreover, a post-purchase share was found to more impact than a pre-purchase one. A post-purchase share on Facebook drives 20% more ticket sales per share than a pre-purchase one. The relevance of this for brands and retailers is that post-purchase social commerce may well be more valuable than pre-purchase social commerce. (NB social commerce is defined by Eventbrite as “ the intersection of social media activity and eCommerce”
Also of note is that revenue per share varies by product category (not just price) – business events have high share rates but generate few sales, whilst music events have lower share rates but higher DPS ($12 vs average RPS $2.53)
Full list here.
