Facebook this week started testing on a new ‘Buy’ button that might make the social media giant the new center of online purchases.
The idea is for the Buy button to show up in ads that appear in FB news feeds. When that button is clicked, it would allow the customer to buy the product from the business without ever leaving the Facebook site.
Facebook collects plenty of data from its one billion member userbase, but the company has said this week that it would fully respect people’s privacy rights.
Facebook noted in an online post that it built the Buy button feature with privacy built in, and it has taken many steps to ensure that the experience of paying from within Facebook is safe. No credit card or debit card data that people give to FB when people finish a transaction will ever be shared with any advertiser.
As of this week, this test has only been rolled out to a few small retailers in the US.
Twitter also is rumored to be flirting with adding a Buy button to its site. Facebook has thought about trying to get more e-commerce flowing on the FB site, but it has not had a lot of success to date. The firm noted in early 2014 that it wanted to come out with some sort of call to action button that would go beyond the well known Like button.
If the Buy button test is a success, this could help the website to tap into the huge online consumer market. This is especially true with more people accessing Facebook from smart phones and other mobile devices, particularly popular with Millennials.
It is easy to see why Facebook is trying to tap the e-commerce market – in 2014, US e-commerce will hit over $300 billion, and mobile e-commerce will reach $57 billion.
As Facebook continues to grow in popularity, it seems to us that there could be a huge potential for it to increase revenue with this new Buy button idea. Does Amazon have anything to worry about? Not just yet, but we would not underestimate Facebook, that’s for sure!