F-commerce on the rise

PayPal has unveiled Send Money, an application on Facebook which lets users send e-cards and money to friends. It's a move which seems like a no brainer, given that the site has more than 750 million users and a large percentage of them have active PayPal accounts.

It'll be interesting to see how many more businesses will take advantage of f-commerce. It certainly looks like an idea whose time has come. Twelve per cent of social media users have made a purchase from a Facebook store after seeing something on the site, according to the latest eCustomerServiceIndex (eCSI) results from eDigitalResearch and IMRG.

The results show an 8.8 per cent growth in f-commerce over four months as more and more retailers import their website functionality into the social networking site. The study also found that 25 per cent of online consumers now log onto Facebook more than once a day. Meanwhile, 97 per cent plan to log onto the internet this Christmas to browse and buy gifts. Twenty seven per cent will access the internet from their smartphone to browse and buy, whilst another nine per cent will use their tablet devices to do the same.