Facebook Continues Its Full-Court Press Into Retail

The news coming out of Facebook’s F8 Developer’s Conference last week could have big implications for retailers. The company made some bold announcements regarding its Messenger Platform—including integration with e-commerce sites to facilitate customer service, order verification and receipts, order modification, shipping status, and returns.

That’s a pretty dominating list of interactive e-commerce functions. It’s a list that’s currently fulfilled by a host of solutions providers, from e-commerce platform vendors like NetSuite to chat applications like LivePerson to third-party logistics providers like UPS. Facebook is wading into some hotly contested waters teeming with schools fish, big and small.

If Facebook’s Messenger application for e-commerce gains even moderate traction among the company’s 1.3 billion subscribers (700 million of whom are active), it plants Facebook even more firmly as an important element in your omni-channel strategy. Where the “buy button” fizzled, Messenger might sizzle. Everlane and Zulily are already in pilot.

Adding to the intrigue (and speaking of its bold affront on providers of retail systems), Facebook enabled peer-to-peer payments within Messenger just the week prior, allowing users with Visa or MasterCard debit cards issued by a U.S. bank to transfer funds to one another within the app. Not necessarily surprising given that VP of Messaging Products David Marcus was most recently president at PayPal, but are merchant accounts next?

For now, Facebook says no. But the one-two punch of its foray into the facilitation of e-commerce transactions and a major announcement in the payments space sure looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and smells like a duck. If not commercial payments, the timing of the announcements begs the question—to what end?

In the short term, there’s no denying that making the Messenger platform an intermediary of the interaction between consumers and retailers will win Facebook what it covets most; data. But, details around Facebook’s next-generation e-commerce integration are a bit sparse, leaving some big unanswered questions about the ownership and use of that data. We know Facebook loves consumer data, and its apps are specifically engineered to suck it in like a Dyson vacuum cleaner. Retailers love data too. As Facebook hammers its way into the facilitation of e-commerce for its 700 million Messenger users, data ownership could prove a slippery slope. The more consumers engage the app, the higher the volume of valuable consumer preference data it generates. How much of that data will retailers be willing to give up, or even share?

Enabling free peer-to-peer payments is a data play on Facebook’s part too. There’s always a data play with Facebook. Personal, contextual, financial—consider the marketing value in the ability to align peer-to-peer financial exchanges with incredibly personal user attributes. But Facebook addicts—er—users, won’t care. As long as developers at the F8 conference keep coming up with stuff they didn’t realize they could live without, users will keep living their lives as transparently as they’re asked to. Maybe that’s the payoff Facebook is planning to give retailers as it commandeers the consumer’s e-commerce experience.