Using new technology from the social networking site Facebook, SecretPrices.com is offering a “My Shopping” application that lets registered Facebook users add to their profile page a shopping portal based on the product database of eBay’s Shopping.com. Since Friday, 375 Facebook users have launched My Shopping, Marc Mezzacca, founder of SecretPrices.com and its holding company, NextGen Shopping LLC, tells Internet Retailer.
Mezzacca says he expects the number of My Shopping users to continue growing quickly on Facebook because of the viral aspect of social networking. “It’s exponential because as more Facebook users add it, their friends add it,” he says.
The My Shopping application, which takes seconds to install from the applications section of Facebook.com, is designed to let users search millions of products, link to buy pages of retailers, rate and mark items they’ve purchased, and earn commissions when visitors to their profile page purchase items mentioned on the page, Mezzacca says.
SecretPrices.com is still working on a commission formula, which it will combine with a broader incentive program to get Facebook users and their friends to shop in the My Shopping portal, Mezzacca says. “The hard part of this is getting people to keep coming back and shop,” he says. “So the incentives should come in handy.”
Josh Silverman, CEO of Shopping.com, which already has partnerships with more than 100 social networking sites, says Facebook offers unusual promise because of the depth to which its partners can share content. “What’s exciting about Facebook is that it’s the first site we’ve seen that really distributes shopping and product information deep into its online communities,” he says, adding that, like Shopping.com, Facebook has opened up its platform to outside software developers.
SecretPrices.com, which combines its own information on coupons and product offers with the product listings from Shopping.com, shares the revenue with Shopping.com for sales originating on its own site.
In May, Facebook released Facebook Platform, a new service which opened up its application programming interface to third-party developers, allowing them to integrate their own software applications directly with Facebook. Facebook lists more than 30 developers who have started integrating with it, including the travel site SideStep.com, mobile photo sharing service Tiny Pictures Inc. and Channels.com, a site for sharing information on TV programs.
The only organization other than SecretPrices.com to integrate a shopping application, however, is eBay, which last week launched its eBay To Go service for integrating social networking sites, blogs and other sites to eBay.com in an effort to create more traffic to eBay.
An eBay spokesman notes that the Facebook projects fit into eBay’s long term strategy of using social networks. “This is a good example of where we see the Internet going, with people coming together online to shop, to learn, to explore and to communicate,” he says. “We see these all as different components of e-commerce.”
Facebook, which launched in 2004 as a social networking site only for college students, opened participation last year to the general public. That move has led to strong growth in membership among consumers in the 25-34 and 35+ age groups, according to comScore Inc.
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