Amazon Connects With Facebook For Social Music & Media Shopping
Despite being a pioneer in user recommendations and its overall leadership in the online shopping sector, Amazon has been slow to embrace social shopping. But a new feature launched yesterday allows Amazon shoppers who connect their Facebook account to Amazon to get recommendations from their Facebook friends on what to buy.
Numerous studies have shown that a friend's recommendations have the most weight with shoppers, and the Amazon Facebook connection places the users friends right inside the buying cycle. Shoppers who connect their accounts can:
- Discover Amazon recommendations for music, movies and more based on Facebook Favorites and Likes.
- See upcoming birthdays and find your Facebook friends' Amazon Wish Lists more easily.
- Get gift suggestions for your friends based on their Facebook Favorites and Likes.
- Explore your friends' Favorites and see who has similar interests.
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It’s pretty big news actually. Amazon seems like they’re always thinking 5 moves ahead.
They’re basically just implementing the Open Graph that was announced a few weeks back at the F8 conf.
I’d be more impressed if they innovated with a an incentives based gaming mechanic or had a group deals feature like http://www.groupon.com/
It’s still cool though, I’m a amazon power user.
Amazon has for long had its own social features (such as reviews) but this new move signals a strategic recognition of Facebook, and the importance of social commerce, which signifies implications for the entire ecommerce sector. There have been calls for some time now for tighter integration between Facebook and ecommerce sites but despite more than 100 million fans using Facebook Login, the ecommerce sector has been slow to adopt it.
In the last few months we’ve seen a growing appetite from the ecommerce sector to look afresh at social media integration. Facebook Like has been a runaway success, with almost 70% of emarketers planning to, or having already implemented it on their ecommerce sites. One third of emarketers plan to, or have already implemented, Facebook Login. There’s a great blog on this with a tease preview of what Your Amazon Facebook page will look like here.