Testing a New Way to Discover and Buy Products on Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Testing a New Way to Discover and Buy Products on Facebook

facebook.com

39 pointsarrel21 comments

When is facebook finally going to understand that people are not on facebook to buy shit. They're there to communicate with people.

When people stop buying things on Facebook

They have yet to do so, and Facebook ads remain lucrative.

How come an ad is called 'Suggested Post'?

They just omit the identity of the suggestor..

Talk about closing the attribution gap present in almost all paid advertising.

Next evolution: use their recognition algorithms to identify shirts, jewelry,... in your friends photos and have "buy now" buttons all over the picture.

I actually think that could be a decent way to balance the fact that people don't want to see ads with the fact that FB has to have ads in order to make money. As long as they did it in a way that didn't disrupt the user experience too much

Unsurprisingly enough, that's already patented, as far as the image mapping to purchase process is concerned. I believe by Amazon, though.

I like this for microtransactions, but I don't buy it for physical goods.

Couple reasons:

First, I'm surprised that anyone would purchase with so little information. A photo/price doesn't seem like enough room to make the sale.

Second, the merchant loses the chance to upsell and/or retarget the customer.

What's the counterargument? That the conversion rate is improved enough to offset these downsides?

Shopping experience on amazon seems much better but to counter-argue: 1) incremental sales are gold and 2) I'd say getting a sale actually provides a huge opportunity to cross-sell/engage.

I'm guessing this wont do well for mainstream, amazon-style commerce but could find some niches like impulse buys, donations, tickets, etc.

Ask them about it: https://www.facebook.com/LollyWollyDoodle

Are they taking 30% of the payment?

Advertisers are still paying for the ads, so probably not.

As logical as that sounds it's not the way it works for the "Buy Now" buttons they've been testing on Virtual Goods ads for a while now: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/payments/ads_virtual_go...

You pay to get distribution for your ad and if it converts you pay 30% of the total purchase price on top of that.

Facebook and YouTube have both tried product sales with insane revenue splits and seem to have failed so far. Not sure why they are trying this again.

My guess is that most don't have 30% of gross spare when they could just link out. It's one level of egregious for Apple to do it but at least they have the stored credit cards to throw around, not really sure what Facebook is bringing to the table here.

Wonder if they will allow 3rd party payments through paypal, amazon, or google.

If I were Facebook I'd want to control the entire process. I imagine for the majority of their users it will be easier to simply get a credit card on file and use that moving forward.

WRT get a credit card on file. Why would Facebook outsource storing payment information?

Have any of the big players (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc) allowed you to pay with a third party payment provider?

You can use Paypal on Google Play: https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/4646425?hl=en

Why would Facebook outsource storing payment information?

Because others might be better at it.

This is great news! Two Tap (YC W14) offers a buy button for any app and we're regularly seeing multipliers on conversion rate on mobile when streamlining the checkout.

Fuck this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com