Baynote, and ecommerce company has put together a report card on shopping experiences for consumers, and found strangely enough that using Facebook to shop for goods was a pretty bad experience.
As the chart points out, retail websites were rated very well, but facebook got less than stellar reviews, actually scoring less than using phones or tablets to shop. I’m not sure why tablet and phones weren’t just called mobile, but maybe they wanted to differentiate that because of their size.
One of the most interesting parts of the survey, which you can find here, is that 91.4% respondants said they didn’t buy anything on a Facebook fan page. This could be because not all Facebook fanpages have any sort of way to actually buy a product, such as integrated ecommerce, or because of some other reason. I’d love to know that part, and how that influenced the survey.
The real interesting part is that 80.2% of the people said they were not influenced at all from social media. It seems that shoppers don’t really care what they see in social media, or worse, brands aren’t that good at using social media to sell products.
This really raises some serious questions about the effectiveness on Facebook pages as a direct sales mechanism. Either it really sucks, or perhaps Facebook users aren’t willing to admit, or don’t know that they were influences by choices they saw on Facebook.