Mashable Discusses How Merchants Can Turn Their Ecommerce Site Into a Facebook Store with Wishpond

Written by Sarah Kessler, Turn Your Ecommerce Site Into a Facebook Store With Wishpond There are more potential consumers on Facebook than there are logging into eBay and Amazon combined. Local shopping engine Wishpond is the latest startup to tap into merchants’ desire to reach them. It’s launching a Facebook commerce solution Tuesday.illustrates how Wishpond’s new service, RetailConnect, allows retailers to import products directly from their website to create a Facebook Store in less than a day: Wishpond already aggregates product listings from about 1,700 retailers for its local search engine, which allows customers to search stores near them by product. With the new commerce solution,RetailConnect, retailers can use the technology to open a Facebook store in less than a day by asking the startup to crawl its website and create listings. When consumers select a listing, Wishpond directs them back to the retailer site to check out. Launching the storefront platform is another move that Wishpond has made toward packaging its consumer-facing product aggregation and search technology for retailers. In December it launched a widget that allows retailers to embed a local commerce search feature on their own websites. Depending on the size of the store, RetailConnect costs between $0 and $500 per month. RetailConnect will join a handful of other startups that are aiming to be the Facebook storefront platform of choice. Some features that distinguish it are a somewhat customizable look, a widget that helps customers find the nearest store location, and daily automatic updates to inventory. All of the startups making their way into the F-commerce space, however, face the same question: Will the more than 500 million people on Facebook ever see it as a place to shop? “A lot of users are not there to buy products, but if they like a fan page, that means they are interested in buying from that brand,” Wishpond CEO Ali Tajsekandar says. “Once they’re in Facebook they don’t want to be leaving Facebook to shop.” Got to www.wishpond.com/merchants to make your own Facebook Store for free!

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