Facebook and eBay have unveiled a new partnership for online shopping. The new business unit will apparently “seamlessly” integrate eBay with Facebook’s “open graph” platform—its map of friends and social connections—to create a “social shopping” experience.
As well as "liking" or "recommending" pages, the new service will let Facebook users "want" items they find during online shopping. They can also “love," “own," or “review” products, according to Forbes, so that friends can see these notifications in their news feeds and visit the sellers themselves.
Facebook executive Katie Mitic, who joined eBay's board of directors last month, announced the new service at eBay’s developer conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. The new service takes “word-of-mouth and puts a bullhorn to it," she said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The idea is to make e-commerce a more social experience, says Matthew Mengerink general manager of X.commerce, eBay’s developer and merchant division. Online shopping remains “a very individualistic and lonely experience," he told TechCrunch.
The move will now allow developers to create applications for eBay and Facebook, based on users’ preferences and enhance opportunities for buying and selling online.
“We’re building up small, midtier and large merchants to accelerate growth,” Mengerink said. “If we have millions of merchants on this globally, we can distribute the best integration of your merchandise and connect into the eBay store front.”
