While retailers have their presence on social networking sites managed for customer interactivity, most of them haven’t used social networking for ecommerce. That is why it has been quite a common opinion that social media is a just a fad for businesses. 1-800-Flowers have dispelled this misconception. 

Social media optimization is becoming more than the method of brand awareness increase. The combination of online store and social networking is no longer a fancy. This is what we all were talking about: social networking is ushering in a new era for businesses.

1-800-Flowers is now the first (and not the last) online store on a social networking website. On their group on Facebook 1-800-Flowers offer to shop “without ever having stray from your Facebook account”. Online shopping process is the same as if customers were making purchases from an ordinary online store: customers can browse items, place them into shopping cart, select a delivery date and send. 1-800-Flowers embedded their shopping widget into their fan group on Facebook and claim to have commited their first retail transaction on Facebook on July 8, 2009.   

1-800-Flowers has 1,927 fans on Facebook for the moment. Taking into consideration that 1-800-Flowers.com is on the list of top online retailers rate by Hitwise and regarding the growing interest in social media as ecommerce outlet, we can predict a success of this online business experiment.

This transformation from a fan group into the online retail store seems natural: with more than 250 million members Facebook represents an irresistible outlet for customer acquisition. There are nearly 300 thousand companies’ fan groups on Facebook, from Coca-Cola to McDonald’s. I will not be surprised if they follow the example of 1-800-Flowers shortly.