Finance Geek

As the year draws to a close, Google is shutting down several projects that haven’t panned out as the company hoped. Perhaps most notably, the search giant is ending its foray into solar thermal energy.

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Earlier this week “Dr. Doom” Nouriel Roubini and Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis author James Rickards got into a war of words on Twitter over the return of the gold standard. (Read the exchange.) As Rickards explained last week on The Daily Ticker, [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Congress has managed to jump from one political fiscal fight to another for the greater part of 2011. First, there was the budget debate on how to fund the government for the rest of this year. Then there was the debt-ceiling debate resulting in the U.S. losing [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! On Tuesday, the IMF announced a new set of measures designed to provide short-term liquidity to ailing nations, the latest in a series of measures aimed at stemming Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. But “money alone is not going to resolve the problems” in Europe, where the “contagion [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! If you thought the economy was starting to pick up and perhaps was even off to the races after months of positive GDP growth and much better than expected consumer health, think again. That’s according to, Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics at New York University, who says [...]

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I seem to be posting a lot of stats this week, and today it is that 50% of ecommerce visitors are logged into Facebook.  This is data from a Sociable Labs study of 456 million visits to ecommerce sites.

As Sociable Labs CEO Nisan Gabbay says:

People look at Facebook’s active user count but don’t quite get how pervasive the service is in people’s lives. It’s there all the time in any activity they do online

(As a sidebar, I got to know Nisan in 2007 when he wrote an excellent series of posts on why selected consumer internet companies had succeeded.  He’s a smart guy – see his Betfair case study here.)

Ecommerce site owners can get rich data on the 50% who are logged in to Facebook and use that to target offers or otherwise personalise their sites.  Gender and age are the obvious places to start, but there is a huge volume of data to work with and the smartest etailers will use it all, employing sophisticated regression analysis to determine which parameters are the most effective to target against.

In order to get at the data the ecommerce site has to get its customers to link their accounts using Facebook Connect.  This can be a stumbling block as forcing people to connect to Facebook will hit conversion rates and have an immediate negative impact on the bottom line, particularly given that Facebook Connect often seems to be poorly implemented, especially on mobile.

I think we can expect to see etailers start offering incentives to connect via Facebook, or making it mandatory to access non-purchase path functionality like tracking orders.  After that we will start to benefit from a more personalised ecommerce experiences.

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