Brands can use ecommerce storefront apps to sell products directly from their Facebook Pages. Some apps allow customers to checkout without having to leave Facebook, while others let them complete the transaction on a brand’s website. Brands can direct users away from their Page to a dedicated Facebook canvas app hosting a full-featured store, or they can simply use a Page tab app as a landing page for their website’s store.

Here we’ll showcase how five brands using five reputable apps approach ecommerce on Facebook. We’ll also outline some best practices such as providing buttons for sharing products and Liking your Page, using a compelling landing tab to draw users into your store, and offering a variety of payment methods.

The following is an excerpt. The full length article, available in our Facebook Marketing Bible, includes analysis of four more Facebook ecommerce implementations and additional best practices.

The Miami HEAT via Milyoni

Page: The Miami HEAT NBA basketball team

Storefront App Provider: Milyoni

Tab App Name: Shop

Home Page: The Miami HEAT uses a landing page to display some of it top products and draw people to click through to its canvas app. Once the full featured app has loaded, users can search products, browse a catalog, Like the Miami HEAT’s Page, or follow the team on Twitter. The center of the app provides a promotion code for use at checkout, and several featured products, though without sharing buttons.

Product View: Clicking through to a product reveal multiple photos, options to share via email, Facebook, and Twitter, and a Like button that allows for quick sharing to the news feed, and that displays a Like count which can provide social proof for the quality of products.

Checkout: A checkout powered by Verisign lets users complete their order within Facebook using their credit card.

Negatives: The app may be too full-featured for merchants only selling a few items and who are more concerned with driving sales than follows of their social media presences. Sharing buttons on the home page could help, but might make the app even more cluttered.

Overall: Milyoni’s app provides a great shopping experience that’s entirely contained within Facebook. The Miami HEAT did well to provide a compelling landing page that can persuade users to wait for the canvas app to load. Using the home page to drive valuable Likes and follows of a brand’s social media presence while using the product pages to drive sales strikes a good balance.

Five Best Practices

1.  Sharing Options on Products – Placing Like buttons on the home page view of your products, and additional email, Twitter, and Facebook sharing options on product pages makes it easy for users to tell friends about items they find interesting, even if they don’t buy them. These shares drive referral sales, and represent the primary advantage of conducting Facebook-integrated ecommerce.

The full article, complete with more best practices and reviews of ecommerce implementations, can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing, advertising, and ecommerce on Facebook.

Facebook released v3.4.3 of its Facebook for iPhone native mobile app yesterday. Though the release notes only list “Various bug fixes” and “Improved security”, we’ve discovered the update permits users to view the navigation menu in landscape mode. As many of the app’s features could already run in landscape mode, this allows for a more unified experience.

Despite few tangible improvements in versions 3.4.2 or 3.4.3, Facebook for iPhone is still the most advanced of Facebook’s native mobile apps, boasting some features lacking in the latest version of Facebook for Android. Event checkins, a Places map, and Find Friends were all added in the 3.4 and 3.4.1 updates. The app also recently began pulling the news feed from m.facebook.com, streamlining development for Facebook’s mobile team.

This month also saw the leak of screenshots and documentation of a new Facebook mobile photos app for iOS, which could be integrated into Facebook for iPhone or released as a standalone app. That app might allow for multi-shot sharing, filters, video support, and an activity feed.

The Facebook for iPhone continued steady growth through June, gaining 2.79 million daily active users to reach 45.2 million DAU, and gaining 4.3 million monthly active users reach a massive 80.7 million MAU. These stats, from our application growth tracking service AppData, make Facebook for iPhone the largest Facebook app by DAU, and the second largest by MAU to Zynga’s CityVille.

With Facebook for iPhone 3.4.1, users can now turn their phone horizontally to switch the navigation menu to landscape mode. This might make it easier for those using the app while laying on their side, or who use the app’s features in landscape mode and don’t want to switch to portrait mode when navigating between features. And, by bringing landscape navigation to the iPhone app, Facebook also sets itself up to offer a more unified interface experience with its forthcoming iPad app (many people prefer using their tablets in landscape mode).

For the time being, though, one downside we’ve found is that users can’t access the Account menu or add bookmarks in landscape mode.

Overall, Facebook has said that it is focused on both native apps and its mobile web site, and it is working on an HTML5 version that could offer many of the multimedia features available for native apps.

The booming popularity of all of its mobile services, though, means it has its hands full adding new features for its demanding users. Users on the comments thread of the announcement are requesting the ability to tag friends in status updates as users can on Facebook for Android, and the option to Like comments.

Expect Facebook to continue upping its mobile focus as it faces a broad range of mobile competitors.

Facebook began a search for a Head of Finance in its Brazil office, as well as a Head of Marketing Communications for Norther America. Other jobs posted to the company’s Careers Page and LinkedIn feed include account management, technical positions, business jobs, and attorneys across its United States, Singapore and Dublin, Ireland offices.

Posts added this week on Facebook’s Careers Page:

• Head of Finance Operations (Sao Paulo)
• Head of Marketing Communications – North America
• Marketing Communications Manager
• Monetization Product Marketing – Sales and Marketing Solutions
• Recruiting Lead – Engineering – Palo Alto
• Manager, Applications
• Manager, ERP
• Oracle Applications DBA
• Business Analyst, Hyperion
• Product Manager, Tax Technology
• Corporate Communications Coordinator, Internal Communications (contract)
• Corporate Finance Associate
• Director, Accounting 1106003 (Menlo Park, CA)
• International Payroll Lead (Dublin)
• Manager, Global Supplier Management
• Technical Program Manager
• Account Manager – Spanish (Dublin)
• Commerce Manager (Palo Alto)
• Analyst, Measurement Solutions (New York)
• Front End Engineer, Infrastructure
• Software Engineer 1106004

Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:

• Team Lead, User Operations (Austin)
• Measurement Researcher (Chicago)
• Analyst, Pricing and Yield (New York)
• Measurement Researcher (Palo Alto)
• Measurement Researcher (New Yok)
• Quantitative Business Analyst (Palo Alto)
• Team Lead, User Operations – Asia Pacific Team (Palo Alto)
• Commerce Manager (Palo Alto)
• HR Business Partner (Austin)
• Technical Program Manager – Platform Security
• Corporate Communications Associate Manager, Internal Communications
• Commercial Counsel
• Sales Training Consultant (Singapore)
• Commercial Transactions Counsel
• Lead, Risk Management (Austin)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Facebook continued to hire its interns this week, as we saw from the company’s LinkedIn feed, and according to its Careers Page, recruiting, sales, business and analyst operations were being hired, along with data center staff.

New hires per LinkedIn and Other Sources:

• Dereck Quock, Application Engineer – formerly a student.
• Kelsey Silver, Office Manager – formerly an Executive Assistant to CEO at Royale Security.
• Brendan Cleary, Network Engineer – formerly a Senior Network Engineer at Pocket Kings.
• Timothy Hawkins, Manager of Data Center Facility Operations – formerly did similar work for the U.S. Navy.
• Ian Jablonowski, User Interface Engineering Intern.
• Kara Wilburn, Legal Intern – formerly a Senior Operations Manager at JiWire.
• Kimeya Afshar, HR Coordinator.
• Zachary Triplett, Analyst User Operations – previously a legislative aide for Sen. Kevin Eltife in Texas.
• Brice Chalopet, Inside Sales Associate – previously worked as the Head of marketing and Business Development at NEWNET3D.
• Alex Wyler, Engineering Intern – formerly performed similar work at U Connect LLC.
• Nidhi Manchikanti, Recruiting Coordinator.
• David Forster, Recruiting – formerly worked in talent acquisition at RMS.
• Sonya Beach, PHR, Human Resources – previously did similar work for Lucasfilm.
• Alessandro Jorge, MBA Summer Intern – former Business Analyst at Neuding Strategic Consulting.
• Stefano Tuveri, MBA Intern – formerly worked as a Consultant for Accenture.
• Kevin Bennett, Intern – former Business Development Consultant at Banyan Water.
• Sean Quinlan, Developer Support Intern – formerly did similar work as an intern at CDM Technologies.
• Jessica Jenks, Monetization Product Marketing MBA Intern – former Manager of Production & User Experience at Vantage Media.

Prior listings now removed from the Facebook Careers Page:

• Partner Engineer – Mobile (Hong Kong)
• Communications Manager (France)
• People Services Representative – Contractor
• Engineering Recruiting Lead
• Recruiter – Contract – Non Tech
• Recruiting Manager, Austin Texas
• Technical Recruiting Lead – Palo Alto
• University Recruiter, Creative (Product Design, User Experience)
• Business Analyst, Hyperion
• Product Manager, Tax Technology
• Law Enforcement Response Analyst, French (Dublin) – Contract
• Security & Incident Response Investigator (Dublin) – Contract
• Executive Assistant D.C.
• Business Operations Associate (Dublin)
• Business Operations Associate – Payments & Risk
• Director, Global Supplier Management
• Group Technical Program Manager
• Data Center Technician (NC)
• Manager, Datacenter Facilities Operations (OR)
• National Sales Operations Manager
• Director, DSO Ad Operations (Dublin)
• Associate, Global Sales Development (London)
• National Sales Operations Manager
• Analyst, Platform Operations (Hyderabad)
• Intellectual Property Specialist, User Operations (Austin)
• Legal Support Analyst, User Operations (New Grad) (Austin)
• Intellectual Property Specialist, User Operations (Austin)
• Legal Support Analyst, User Operations (New Grad) (Austin)
• Agency Marketing Manager (New York)
• Measurement Researcher (Palo Alto)
• Strategic Partner Development, Entertainment

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

This afternoon Facebook announced two updates to its Comments Box plugin for third-party websites, along with the fact that 300,000 sites have integrated the plugin since its March 1st release. Users can select to sort comment reels by reverse chronological or chronological order as well as by Facebook’s “social ranking” algorithm. Reverse chronological sorting will help users when following comments in real-time is important, such as on sites discussing currently airing television shows or sporting events.

Facebook also confirmed the addition of the “Boost Comment” button we covered last week, which allows moderators to select certain comments to push to the top of a reel.

The Comments Plugin launched March 1st and had been integrated into 50,000 sites by mid-April. Today’s announcement of the 300,000 site milestone indicates adoption has accelerated in the last few months. This is a sign that the plugin has matured passed some initial concerns about bugginess and lack of features and is now a more viable comments solution with added distribution benefits.

Users can now click on a downward facing arrow when viewing the Comments Box plugin to reveal sorting options. They can use reverse chronological sorting to see the latest feedback to a post. Alternatively, they can sort by chronological order if initial responses to a blog post or content are what is most important to them. By default, users see the previously available social ranking sorting,  which causes comments with lots of Likes and replies from commenters with good reputations to rise to the top.

Facebook’s Director of Media Partnerships, Justin Osofsky notes in the announcement that “many partners have reported significant increases in referral traffic and engagement” from using the Comments Box plugin. Adoption may continue to accelerate as current implementations serve to raise awareness of the plugin.

Facebook has partnered with American Express to let AmEx cardholders redeem their Membership Rewards points for Facebook Ads credit. Card holders can receive $50 in ad credit for 6,750 Membership Rewards points which they earn for each dollar the spend and can be redeemed on American Express OPEN’s Facebook Page or the Membership Rewards site.

The partnership values the reward points at $0.0074 each – a significantly better rate than the $0.0050 per point American Express users can get when they redeem for traveller’s cheques. This favorable rate is likely designed to help Facebook get businesses hooked on its ads, while increasing the relevance of the Membership Rewards program to American Express’ customers.

The announcement comes just a week after location-based service Foursquare announced a partnership with American Express to offer cardholders big bonuses when they check in and make purchases at select businesses. For example, cardholders who check in and spend $50 at Sports Authority get a $20 credit added to their AmEx account.

With virtual currency such as Facebook Credits powering new purchase incentive and loyalty programs, American Express appears determined not to be left behind. Its partnerships with Facebook and Foursquare could boost appeal of its services to both younger entrepreneurs conducting marketing on the social network, as well as early adopters who make purchase decisions based on discounts sourced through their mobile devices.

The two companies worked together last year to launch American Express’ “Small Business Saturday” campaign where businesses could sign up for financial services to gain a $100 Facebook Ads credit. American Express also offers similar deals for free ad credit with Bing and Yahoo.

For Facebook, the American Express partnership could help it introduce its Ads product to small businesses, one of the financial service company’s core client bases which it handles through its American Express OPEN division. A recent study showed that only 22% of local business owners had used Facebook Ads despite 94% being aware of the marketing channel. This indicates that there’s plenty of runway for the revenue of Facebook’s self-serve ad business to grow if it can attract the long-tail of small and local businesses.

If American Express card holders find the ad credit earned through their Membership Rewards redemptions help their business, they might ramp up spend or at least keep it constant over time, quickly helping Facebook recoup any initial loss through the promotion. To increase the likelihood that the initial ad runs of these new clients go well, Facebook and American Express are providing guides to ads tool best practices.

If Facebook can adequately educate the new advertisers secured through the partnership have a positive experience with Facebook ads, it could have success converting cardholders into long time advertisers, and it might seek to establish more partnerships like this one to extend ad credits to small businesses.

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Acquinity Interactive, SolutionSet, Seismic Games, Atakama Labs, Spooky Cool Labs, Atari, Voxer and Wild Needle.

• Sr. Email Marketing Manager
• Online Media- Senior Affiliate Manager
• Senior Online/Web Product Manager
• Online Ad Trafficking Operations Assoc./Coordinator

• Sales Account Coordinator

• Sr. Service Development Engineer
• Flash Gameplay Engineer

• Senior Game Designer
• Product Manager
• Business Intelligence Manager

• Game Designer – Social Games
• User Interface Expert – Social Games
• Character Modeler / Artist
• Software Engineer – Games Back End
• Software Engineer – Games Front End / Unity

• Mobile Producer/Game Designer
• Casual/Social Online Producer/Game Designer

• Product Manager, Android

• Mobile Game Developer at Well-Funded Studio
• Mobile Game Developer

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

Facebook released significant improvements to its Platform developer toolset this morning with the introduction of the Graph API Explorer and a new version of the Developer app. The Graph API Explorer lets developers make and test API calls and see formatted results in-line, preview extended permissions dialogs, explore connections between objects, and more. The enhanced Developer app allows for quick access to apps, important app info, Getting Started guides, and roles management.

These changes should make the Facebook Platform more inviting to new developers, while streamlining workflow for veterans, especially those administrating multiple apps.

Graph API Explorer

Before the launch of the Graph API Explorer, it could be a bit difficult for developers to get their bearings in Facebook’s programmatic interface. They could turn to third-party API testing consoles such as Apigee, or sort through documentation and forums, but the Graph API Explorer offers an official, more visually-oriented introduction to building on the Graph API.

When developers visit the Graph API Explorer, they’ll first see a GET call for their personal ID. From there they can click links to view an object’s connections, and view detailed descriptions of various fields. The ability to click instead of type to explore connections between objects makes the interface especially easy for new developers.

User data, friends data, and extended permissions access tokens can be generated to view private data and test APIs, and developers see the same permissions dialog their users would see. Developers can switch between different Graph API URLs and between GET, POST, and DELETE to both experiment and actually make changes. IDs in the formatted results returned by calls can be clicked to quickly navigate to details of that object.

The Explorer can’t currently be used to create or test with designated test users, but Facebook may add some of this functionality in the future. In the comments of the announcement blog post, Facebook’s Namita Gupta explains that photo uploading also can’t be tested with the Graph API Explorer as there is “no way to support multipart/form-data in the parameters but we are working on this.” Overall, though, the developer response to the tool has been positive so far.

The Graph API Explorer could help increase self-reliance amongst Platform developers by allowing them to more easily test their way through than seek help from their peers. This could also reduce the incidence support requests to Facebook’s Platform team and erroneous bug reports. The ability to share a permalink to one’s current view of the Graph API Explorer, as one can from Apigee’s console, could make the development process more social by letting developers show their problems to others and receive advice.

Streamlined Developer App

The design of the Developer app, which allows developers to create new apps and manage settings of their existing ones, has stayed mostly stable since 2009. As Facebook app development became more of a business with developers controlling multiple apps and needing to manage large teams with various roles, the original decline became clunky. It also didn’t properly serve as a portal to documentation that could help new developers.

The redesigned Developer app begins a full roll out today starting with a limited set of developers. Its dashboard displays one’s most recently viewed apps, and developers can search using a typeahead to go directly to a desired app. Selecting an apps brings up important information about it including its app ID, app secret, and various URLs. Facebook also says that it has ”reorganized the sections within the Developer App to reduce redundant fields.”

Getting Started guides to apps on Facebook, mobile, and websites can be accessed from a navigation menu. Facebook has simplified the process of assigning and managing administrator, developer, tester, and Insights user roles. Speed has also been increased and workflow improved by “eliminating inefficient operations and data fetches.”

While none of this functionality is actually new, the condensed architecture of the app should promote faster navigation, allowing developers to focus on building their apps rather than the process of managing their settings. The release of these new developer tools should serve to improve Facebook’s standing with the developer community. This is especially convenient considering the recent complaints of unfair treatment by some developers whose apps were suddenly disabled last week when Facebook modified its auto-enforcement system to be more aggressive.

RockMelt has upped its bet that there’s a market for social web browsers, announcing a $30 million second round of funding from an all-star list of past and new investors. This comes two weeks after the company launched a version of its browser that tightly integrates with Facebook, thanks to a partnership between the two companies.

However, RockMelt doesn’t have that many users yet. On Facebook, for example, we count 384,000 monthly active users, with slightly under half of those currently coming back every day, according to our AppData tracking service. You can see a spike in users following the June 14th announcement of RockMelt’s official partnership with Facebook, though the daily active user count has dropped back to the pre-announcement level.

So, it’s the engagement of its current users that’s interesting, and that’s what investor Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz stresses in a blog post on the funding today, via the stats below.

• Over 6 hours of use per person per day
• Average of 3 chat conversations per user through RockMelt each day
• 60% of users 35 and under are active chatters, and they each send an average of 65 messages every day and 71% of the youngest cohort use chat.
• Average of 20 uses of the information flow features per person per day
• 80% of searches go through the browser’s search interface rather than a search site
• 56% of users are age 24 and under, 80% under 35.

Horowitz’s partner is not coincidentally Marc Andreessen, cofounder of seminal browser company Netscape, and a Facebook board member. The firm backed RockMelt already in its first round, and participated in this one. It is another Facebook board member, Jim Breyer, who helped lead this new round on behalf of his firm, Accel Partners, and he’ll be joining RockMelt’s board. Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is also joining the board, with his Khosla Ventures also leading the round.

With all this funding, and a tight partnership with the largest social network in the world, we expect to see RockMelt advertising itself more heavily on Facebook and off. Not unlike what Google has successfully been able to do by promoting Chrome across search and its other properties, as well as through traditional ads.

Horoscopes and luck were among the top applications on our list of apps growing by daily active users this week, followed by the dating app Zoosk, quiz app Friend Buzz, a group of mobile apps, and a Turkish video app. The apps on our list below grew from between 70,700 and 1 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Daily Horoscope	5,868,701	+1,042,514	+22%
2.	Your Luck [daily]	599,423	+562,922	+1,542%
3.	Zoosk	1,878,945	+427,504	+29%
4.	Empires & Allies	6,831,823	+358,651	+6%
5.	ibibo.com	360,694	+310,603	+620%
6.	Friend Buzz	207,205	+205,343	+11,028%
7.	Windows Live Messenger	16,490,368	+194,150	+1%
8.	Astrology	2,810,372	+188,904	+7%
9.	Yahoo!	9,096,186	+173,453	+2%
10.	FBML Tab Maker	380,990	+166,912	+78%
11.	Facebook for Every Phone	469,723	+160,383	+52%
12.	Gardens of Time	3,067,611	+141,540	+5%
13.	Static HTML: iframe tabs	1,500,251	+128,339	+9%
14.	flipboard	483,384	+89,504	+23%
15.	HTC Sense	5,954,406	+87,772	+1%
16.	My Tab	244,674	+87,659	+56%
17.	RewardVille	1,350,388	+86,726	+7%
18.	Global Warfare	201,481	+83,567	+71%
19.	Video Yeri	75,276	+74,812	+16,123%
20.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	789,603	+70,730	+10%

Daily Horoscope is an app that grew by more than 1 million DAU this week, like a similar app Astrology with 188,900 DAU, daily Walls posts with a user’s horoscope does make a big dent in a user’s news feed to encourage virality. Your Luck [daily] uses a similar tactic, growing by 562,900 DAU, except that it publishes a luck percentage instead of a horoscope.

Other apps that fell outside of a set category were Zoosk with 427,500 DAU, Friend Buzz with 205,300 DAU — this latter app is a quiz app that posts feed stories to the Walls of friends when a user answers questions about them. The Turkish video app on our list this week grew by 74,800 DAU, Video Yeri.

Mobile-related apps included ibibo.com with 310,600 DAU, which allows users to select from a variety of games for otheir phones. Facebook for Every Phone from Snaptu grew by 160,400 DAU and promises to allow them to download a Facebook app for their phone. The iPad flipboard grew by 89,500 DAU and allows users to view social media information in a magazine-style layout. Finally, HTC Sense grew by 87,800 DAU.

Windows Live Messenger grew by 194,200 DAU and Yahoo! by 173,500 DAU. FBML Tab Maker grew by 166,900 DAU, Static HTML: iframe tabs by 128,300 DAU and My Tab by 87,700 DAU.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.