Facebook's first home appliance business platform closes social shopping challenges

The blueprint for building a "global mall" on Facebook has been ruthlessly watered down by reality. Facebook's social networking mall, Payvment, is planning to close its operations and will end its operations by February 28, foreign media reported. The source said Payvment had sold the customer list to rival Ecwid, while reselling engineers and technology to Intuit.





from its inception to closure, the Facebook-infested shop platform has only been in the past two years. In early 2011, Payvment built the first E-commerce platform on Facebook, and many businesses used the platform to create their own Facebook stores. Over the past two years, Payvment has attracted 175,000 businesses to shop on its platform and has 200,000 registered users, but for now, its monthly active users have fallen to just 10,000.





payvment, often known as "F-commerce," has long wanted to help retailers sell their products on Facebook, and believes that social networking can provide an unprecedented social shopping experience for brand fans. Facebook itself has a recurring dream. The social giant feels that the huge flow of news feeds and the display ads on the home page, as well as the social connections between friends, both large retailers and start-ups, can open their stores here for revenue.





but the opposite may be true. Most of the time, Facebook is an entertainment platform for users, not a shopping mall. Most SNS users prefer to use "praise" buttons, or to comment on goods, rather than buying them directly on social networks. This makes the properties of F-commerce somewhat nondescript.





Another issue that cannot be overlooked is that the payvment is linked to its high reliance on the Facebook platform. For Payvment and other start-up companies, social networking is like the cornerstone of shaking, and it is also under pressure to make a profit. In this case, the prospects for startups on the platform are wavering. One reason for the payvment shutdown is that Facebook has its own retail business online.





In the four quarter of last year, Facebook launched a "gift" service, which allows users to present real gifts to other users as a first step toward e-commerce, unlike the traditional gift-giving of virtual gifts from friends in previous social networking sites.





even if this is not true, the fate of the companies or businesses that hatch on the platform may change at any time. For example, BranchOut, a website based in July 2010, hosts Facebook, hoping to help users find good jobs through their Facebook network. It has been operating with data from LinkedIn and Facebook, and has received tens of millions of of billions of dollars in investment from VC firms. But in 2011, LinkedIn cut off the BranchOut data collection, and the company had to change its business model. In addition, Twitter's third-party client, Tweetro, is too popular to limit the number of users Twitter has imposed on Third-party apps, causing it to be put on Twitter from the app market.




The parasitic strong on the
platform, its future is largely controlled by the platform. This is evident from the fall in Facebook's share price that has been followed by Zynga. At home, Mushroom Street, Beautiful said, know the United States network, such as social sharing based on the relationship between the electronic shopping mall and Taobao, but also quite similar.





want to know, Mushroom street and other sites traffic highly dependent on search engines and social networks, income and highly dependent on the electric platform Taobao, each transaction commission income is Mushroom Street's main source of profit. Regardless of the flow and revenue at which end of the problem, will destroy this mode of operation. When Taobao has an open mind, there is no problem with this pattern, and once Taobao tends to be closed, it must spill over into its "parasitic body". And last May, Taobao has published inside the "Do not support the upstream shopping site to continue to big" comments, this information is no doubt that the shopping guide website are uneasy.





As you can see, these sites are now building their own "moat", trying to gradually weaken the reliance on Taobao. Beautiful said after the completion of the C round of financing shortly after the formation of more than 20 people of commercial products and sales team. The team's main task is to develop products that are suitable for sale and to constantly tap advertisers. It is reported that this team has been able to contribute 30%-40% of the income for beauty. Similarly, Zynga has suspended its exclusive cooperation agreement to get rid of Facebook, and will try to carve out another world through its own Zynga with friends network and zynga.com portals, as well as mobile strategies.





but in any case, these sites have to be completely "independent" and there is a long way to go. To Mushroom Street and beauty as an example, they have to deal with Taobao constraints, on the one hand, but also face the slow growth of Taobao income status. From this point of view, in the realization of information value-added, at the same time, how to build independent competitiveness outside the shopping guide is its imminent challenge.