Facebook Likes for Connecting Online and Offline Commerce
Brazilian arm of C&A is making use of Social Media power in its retail stores by showing Facebook Likes for its products. The initiative, called Fashion like, allows people to ‘like’ C&A products on the company’s Facebook page and then display the number of Facebook likes in each clothes rack in real-time.
It’s questionable whether this may be relevant for their customers, but it represents an interesting step-forward in Social Commerce, specially referred to online-offline commerce connection making use of Facebook power and APIs. There exist many Social Media tools that retailers can make use of to connect their physical and digital presence, empowering their customers with information about their products extracted from Social Media.
We’ve seen several movements in the last few months trying to connect online and offline commerce, and as John Donahoe (eBay CEO) said last October, the line between online and offline shopping is blurring. This movements will benefit end users, providing an integrated shopping experience no matter what shopping channel each customer is using. Actually, most Social Commerce is focused only on online commerce, and we all know that most people research products in Social Media in order to purchase them in physical stores, so this distinction between online and offline is becoming a barrier for most customers.
