The concept of leveraging on existing customers and advocates to drive online retail sales has been explored extensively in the application of recommendation/cross-selling algorithms, social media sharing tools, onsite consumer reviews, and wish-lists as well as recent innovations, such as the Facebook’s Like button. With cross-selling specifically, shoppers can gain access to starting points or suggested items for consideration, removing some cognitive costs and mental barriers-to-buy. Introducing the “social” aspect into cross-selling provides a credible basis for the cross-sell and thus creates trust, in that the source of endorsement is people within the shoppers’ social circle.

Prior to the introduction of open social network APIs (application programming interfaces), to leverage on an existing customer base’s personal identities to drive sales has been difficult, involving painful registration processes and additional headaches about remembering yet another username and password. However, Facebook’s introduction of its Open Graph API has now enabled online retailers and content publishers on the web to socialize their offerings with simple integrations, which, on the consumer’s end, means one-click functionalities (the Like button being the most prominent).

At Zuupy, we have been exploring the possibilities of taking portable social identities to the next level with deep two-way integration with Facebook, social cross-selling features, and facilitating product and brand conversations that drive conversions. Social cross-selling is the overarching objective of what we do – a new paradigm that centers on creating conversations to optimize the sales funnel and accelerate sales cycles, instead of the traditional social media paradigm of using conversations to create “engagement” or “brand awareness.” Below are some suggestions on how you can leverage Facebook’s new API to create dramatically-enhanced shopping experiences using instant personalization:

1. Leverage on product recommendations
Putting social media sharing buttons on a product page and then hoping for healthy, sustainable word-of-mouth marketing activity to happen is negligent at best. With Facebook’s Open Graph API, the opportunity to capture these product recommendations, as well as the valuable comments and advice attached to the recommendations, and display them on the storefront is increasingly obvious. Archiving user-generated content for mass consumption is one of the easiest ways to provide social proof; besides, the more content is accumulated on the retail store, the more SEO and research/purchase planning value said retail store holds.

2. Encourage social purchase sharing
Attaching buyer identities to specific products is powerful, because a purchase is unequivocal in conveying social endorsement: the buyer has actually paid money for the product. Furthermore, the purchaser is more likely to have first-hand knowledge about the product than a non-purchaser. In a way, purchase sharing holds greater substance than mere product recommendations or Likes. The limitations of social purchase sharing are two-fold: privacy and the critical mass issue. Most consumers are unlikely to want to share their purchases, and, even if they do, possibly none of the people in our social circle (the people whose references we trust) happens to have shopped in a given online store, resulting in a dearth of data. However, with social media norms going mainstream, it is expected that consumers will be more open to sharing their purchases and shopping destinations, which in turn would attract their friends to said destinations to make and share their own purchases.

3. Enable solicited social reviews
Ratings and reviews are first-generation social commerce tools that are used to provide social proof and credibility for a certain product or online store. The opportunity offered by Facebook’s Open Graph API is to infuse greater trust, targeting, and contextual relevance into the process: allowing reviews to be requested for from someone known and trusted, instead of showing random reviews from anonymous writers whose knowledge, background, and motive are likely to be questionable. Requesting a review from within one’s social graph also solves the contextual relevance and targeting issue. Unsolicited product reviews are likely to be seen as obtrusive or abrupt, especially on social networks where the prevailing purpose is to socialize.

Of course, these social cross-selling suggestions should be applied in the context of ordinary cross-selling good practices. With social media going mainstream and becoming increasingly open, online retailers can expect that the opportunities to socialize the storefront to increase over time. Notable merchants are already taking bold steps in socializing their stores (here and here), so what are the rest of us waiting for?