Retail giant take on social commerce and launches Facebook store powered by Zibaba in time for Father’s Day

Retail giant take on social commerce and launches Facebook store powered by Zibaba in time for Father’s Day

Marks & Spencer (M&S) is building on its social networking presence by launching a Facebook store using software from Zibaba.

“With over 300,000 Facebook fans, it makes excellent business sense to offer their fans the opportunity to shop directly from their fan page,” stated Ronen Shlomo, Zibaba chief executive.

The store, which is now up and running directly from the M&S Facebook fan page, is focused around Father’s day. The Facebook store offering includes men’s clothing, electrical appliances, gifts for him and travel accessories. The Zibaba software allows for automated catalogue updates directly from an XML feed, so the inventory can be dynamically updated.

Managing Facebook retail process

Shlomo continued: “I believe that brands are looking at the Zibaba solution due to the flexibility of the platform. We offer merchants the choice of setting the checkout to function within Facebook or redirecting back to their own web store for checkout. We additionally enable merchants to run their own group offer deals directly from their store front together with group coupons, which can be redeemed both online and offline.”

Michael Katz, Zibaba vice president of business development and investor relations, added: “We have recently received the approval from Facebook to integrate their advertising API [application programming interface] into our backend, enabling retailers to set up a store and advertise on Facebook directly from the shop admin. We see this as a big milestone in the future of ‘f-commerce’.”