Area of the industry, which gives opportunity for easy entrepreneurial growth due to recent consumer trends: social e-commerce.
It seems as if consumers are spending more time online and less time in malls and shops. A major area of the retail industry in which there are opportunities for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship is in the e-commerce area, specifically looking at social e-commerce. It seems as if retailers are trying to get customers to spend more than just time on Facebook. An article published in May 19,2011 in the Wall Street Journal, points out that e-commerce was responsible for 28% of retail sales in the first quarter of that year. Company’s like J.C. Penney Co. went on to launch in December their Facebook store, which allowed their million’s of fans to shop directly from Facebook during the holiday season. For now, retail transactions coming from Facebook remains small, less than 1% overall e-commerce comes from social commerce. Companies like GNC, believe that this type of commerce could become an important sales driver in the future.
It seems as if companies are still not completely familiar with Facebook’s social e-commerce. This gives a great opportunity for small retail entrepreneurs to start their stores for free without much competition. As mentioned in the article, “Facebook doesn't charge retailers a fee to add the shopping function, nor does it take a cut of transactions that occur on its site.” This is extremely beneficial for entrepreneurial retailers. Small entrepreneurial retailers can start up their stores and promote their products directly from their house and without much cost through the Internet, which if sales are successful, they can have very good profit without having major costs. I found a website called Wishpond.com which gives anybody the opportunity to create a business or store in only 10 minutes in Facebook for free. I even made my own store to check it out, and it worked perfectly for free, I just needed to export the products from another site, set the prices and I was in business. Definitely, social e-commerce is a great and cheap way to start-up a retail store and to embrace an entrepreneurial idea through the Internet.
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703367004576289461779663904.html#ixzz1caQYhlfr
Carlos made an excellent point here pointing out the emerging market for not only e-commerce, but social e-commerce. I never even realized that social e-commerce was so easy and simple to do, and I loved how Carlos actually tried it out to see just how easy it was. I think that e-commerce is slowly emerging and becoming more important for many retailers, and once they are comfortable in the e-commerce market, they will start to expand and realize the area for opportunity through e-commerce as well. Facebook is making a really good deal by offering e-commerce through their site for free. This post really opened up my eyes to the world of social e-commerce, and I'm sure that retailers will catch hold of this trend shortly. Great post, Carlos!
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