Payvment Leverages Social Data To Help Merchants Optimize Sales On Facebook

Payvment, a startup that allows anyone to create and operate a retail storefront on Facebook, is debuting a new feature today that allows merchants to monitor key social commerce metrics to help drive sales.

Payvment’s Facebook App, which launched in November of 2009, lets anyone create a retail store on the social network. The app lets you set up products, categories of products (i.e. shoes, T-shirts, sweaters), import photos, list terms of service and shipping options and more. Once you set up your online shop on Facebook, it will show up in a separate tab on your profile or page under “storefront”. The company also offers a virtual shopping mall of all of its storefronts on Facebook.

Basically, Payvment’s Social IQ technology analyzes merchant data and delivers a daily set of customized actions to help sellers who are new to social commerce grow fans, traffic, and sales. Payvment’s Social IQ also makes it easy for sellers to try social commerce campaigns such as running a Twitter promotion or offering a “Like” discount for fans, while being able to measure exactly how those actions improve product discovery and sales.

With a new Social IQ dashboard, merchants will be greeted with a Social IQ “score”, which provides a benchmark of how effectively the seller is promoting their store and generating engagement relative to other Payvment sellers. Social IQ will tally the deals, promotions and polls a seller has run in the past week; show how shoppers engaged based on the social actions, shows the other sellers who are most active and socially engaged and why.

Based on performance data, sellers will be recommended campaigns such as creating and posting a product poll, or running a seasonal promotion. The seller’s Social IQ score climbs in direct correlation to their growth in fans, reactions (Want, Like), conversations, and product sales driven by these actions.

While Payvment is trying to help more retailers and businesses sell on Facebook, there have been reports of major retailers jumping off the platform because attempts at social commerce have failed. But founder Christian Taylor explains that there’s just too big of an opportunity for product discovery and engagement on Facebook for big brands to stay away for long.

He explains further that it’s actually not surprising that some of these brands didn’t see initial success, as most of them just cloned their retail websites on Facebook. “For F-commerce to drive real product discovery and sales, retailers must have storefronts and conversational tools that are a part of the social fabric of Facebook. When stores are built for product discovery, for sharing, and for authentic conversations, the results are phenomenal,” he says.

Taylor says that in his observations, small retailers and brands have been much quicker to embrace social commerce, and are implementing it much better than large retailers. He thinks it’s only a matter of time before big retailers figure this out and head back to Facebook for commerce.