Most people around the world are familiar with “Facebook”, it’s commonly known as one of the most popular social medias in this digital generation. People use Facebook for communication purpose whether they will post their feeling and events of their life through Facebook’s status, share their new stories with thousands of friends, or play games with users worldwide.

Apart from what Facebook can provide, it is also generated into something which can change our communication into online business.

Facebook business transaction is known as “Facebook commerce” or “F-commerce” in short. The definition of F-commerce derives from the words between E-commerce and Facebook mean “to buy and sell things on Facebook”.

Shoppers can buy products, services or anything that can be sold from Facebook stores and make their payment through various channels. As well as for vendors, they can receive customer’s orders and ship their products to each of them as normally done in general online stores.

In this case, we can separate F-commerce into 2 major types; Commerce on Facebook and Commerce off Facebook.

• Facebook stores or F-stores: F-stores let you build your store via Facebook page, you can add product from your store and let shoppers purchase them right from your Facebook page. Whatever product they click, it will instantly lead them to your ecommerce website.

Some vendors promote their store posting their products along with a link in order to let customers access and lead them to product’s description. They can also instantly start adding their favorite product to a cart if they want.

Another advantage of F-commerce is to build Facebook page for promotional purpose. This channel can be used for promoting store’s campaigns, special events or product releases. It helps customers or fanpages follow up with updates or new stories from your store.

• Facebook credits: Facebook credits are currency used for purchasing digital or virtual goods in games and applications. Credits can be gained by spending your real money, 1 US dollar is equal to 10 Facebook credits.

• Facebook enabled webstores: If you have an online store, it’s possible for you to integrate your store with Facebook so you can follow up with your visitors’ activities performed in your ecommerce site through the help of Facebook.

Facebook users can share their preferences from your Facebook integrated website with their friends. For example, when users click like or post their comments on your website, their actions will be updated in their newsfeed, ticker and timeline, allowing their friends to see and engage with all update stories as needed.

In order to integrate with Facebook, every website needs extension called “Social plug-in”.

Social plug-in is an essential tool in following up with Facebook users’ activities which are done in any websites. So, installing social plug-in on your ecommerce site will allow Facebook users who happen to be your fans or customers interacting with your sites whether they like, comment, or share. All updates will be shown in their Facebook profile allowing their friends to see what they’re interested in your store.

Here are the different social plug-ins you can install in your website.

Like button, Send button, Follow button, Comments, Activity feed, Recommendation box, Recommendation bar, Like box, Login button, Registration, and Facepile.

Currently, there’re many ecommerce software companies including F-commerce as a marketing feature in their application to serve as another promoting channel for vendors. Publishing your store in Facebook and using F-commerce’s advantages can help your store get more opportunity to gain new customers from Facebook users who are possibly not your fans instead of targeting only customers who experienced shopping from your store.

How to choose F-commerce type depends on your ecommerce’s choice, each of them has different functions providing different aspects to vendors. So, choose the one which is right for you as well as select your F-commerce type that most fits with your plan, strategy and advance your ecommerce store to the highest level.