Comments posted by viewers and customers help advertise items to like-minded 'friends'Ms Ashley White started her company, the Polkadot Alley, to supplement her full-time income as a high school teacher.儲存倉By 2009, she had a modest profit and a new baby, which led her to quit her teaching job in Lubbock, Texas. After she got pregnant again in 2011, she found herself constantly on Facebook searching for vendors that sold baby clothes, and that's when she got the idea to turn her e-commerce website, which sells women's clothing and accessories, into a Facebook store.Last year, when it generated US$400,000 (S$507,000) in revenue, her company switched its main customer interface to F-commerce, as it has become known. And this year, she said, the Polkadot Alley, which has eight employees and a 1,500-sq-ft warehouse, is on pace to produce US$1.5 million in revenue - 95 per cent of it coming from people who purchase goods through the comments section of the company's Facebook fan page.For an e-commerce site, moving to Facebook is not without risks. "It only works for a very narrow particular niche of children's apparel or women's clothing with an engaged fan base," said Mr Zak Stambor, managing editor of the Internet Retailer. "It's such an inferior way to purchase online compared to using a website."Among other things, higher-end e-commerce sites offer better images along with the ability to read product details and customer reviews and even to see a video of the product on a model. "There's just a whole host of tools that selling via Facebook doesn't offer," Mr Stambor said.Of course, the biggest challenge is taking payment. Initially, Ms White would post pictures of merchandise on her Facebook page and in order to purchase an item, customers would leave a comment under the picture that said something like, "Sold, XL." They would also leave their e-mail address so they could be invoiced. In the beginning, Ms White processed all of her sales by hand.She continued to plug away to build her fan base, and then on July 11 last year, things changed. "I sold this sports dress and my fans went wild," she said. "I ended up selling over 400 dresses in three hours and generated over US$11,000 in sales in one night."In the d迷你倉沙田ys after the sale, though, she was completely overwhelmed trying to fill orders. She even called a few of her former students and asked them to help process the orders."It's so much work to manage inventory yourself and invoice each customer individually," Ms White said. "It would take hours every sale night, and sometimes I would lose customers because it took me up to 36 hours sometimes to invoice people."Because the system required buyers to post their e-mail addresses on her Facebook page, she also had to worry about competitors poaching her customers. After that night, she started searching for an application to help with payment processing and found Soldsie, a mobile-friendly app that issues invoices directly to people who leave comments on a Facebook post.Commenters receive an invoice by e-mail that can be paid with PayPal or a debit or credit card on file. Soldsie takes 3 per cent of all sales, a fee that is billed at the end of every month. (There are other payment applications that work on Facebook, including Ecwid, Ribbon and Gumroad.)Ms White said she decided to start selling directly on Facebook because she wanted to build an intimate relationship with her customers."With my website, people had to go and find me, and I was in a sea of millions," she said. "With Facebook, if my sister or best friend comments on my page, that draws in their friends to see what we're doing. It's just so much faster."There are some drawbacks, she said. "Your competitors can see everything you are doing. And I have no control over Facebook, so if they sell tomorrow, I would need to figure out something else to do with my business."Facebook declined to share statistics on the number of vendors operating on the site, but Mr Chris Bennett, founder of Soldsie, offered his results as proof that Facebook commerce is growing."We just passed 1,000 stores on Facebook and are moving US$1 million a month through our app." Ninety per cent of his business owners are women, he said, many of them stay-at-home moms based in Southern states, including Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas.New York TimesMelinda Emerson is founder and chief executive of Quintessence Multimedia, a social media strategy and content development company.迷你倉價錢
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