Facebook today announced that its new version of Offers with larger images and calls to action are now available on Android.

In February, the social network began testing the new layout on desktop with an option to shop immediately or get a reminder before the promotion ends. The interface also lets users decide if and when to share the offer with friends. We started seeing this on iOS in early April, and the company officially announced it a few weeks later. Now, the product is uniform across desktop and mobile, including Android.

Overall, the new design is likely to increase conversions on Offers posts because of the cleaner design and more prominent buttons to “Get offer” or “Shop now.” The “Remind Me” button available for some retailers working with Facebook directly allows companies to prompt users to redeem their offer at a later date through a notification on Facebook.

(more…)

Commerce and payments platform Marqeta today announced that it is the company providing the technology behind the Facebook Card, a gift card that can hold balances for a number of retailers or restaurants simultaneously.

Marqeta had agreed with Facebook not to disclose this until now. The announcement came as part of news about Marqeta’s latest round of funding: a $14 million Series B from Greylock IL, Granite Ventures, Commerce Ventures and a number of new angel and strategic investors.

The company’s +M Platform connects online and offline commerce through prepaid loyalty programs, similar to the Starbucks Card. It also allows prepaid amounts from multiple merchants, which is what Facebook is taking advantage of for its card. Facebook Card is a resusable gift card that can be loaded with balances for different businesses when a user’s friends buy them gifts through the social network.

(more…)

Facebook is continuing its test with a few global retailers to make Offers more effective in generating online sales. Part of this includes a new “remind me” button on offers that appear in the mobile feed.

When we found Facebook is testing a new version of Offers in February, the options to shop immediately or get a reminder before the promotion ends were only available on desktop. Now we’ve seen this on mobile, too. The “remind me” button could be especially useful here since the prominence of mobile ads leads to a lot of clicks, but users might not be as likely to complete a purchase on their phones.

(more…)

As part of a recent test that gives users a dedicated section of the site to collect offers they’ve claimed, Facebook is now recommending other offers that users might be interested in.

Last week we saw Facebook testing a new version of its Offers product, which gives users the option to shop immediately or get a reminder before the promotion ends. The new offers, which are being tested with a few select retailers, feature larger images and the interface lets users decide if and when to share the offer with friends. Offers are saved to a new section of a user’s account, which they can access from an Offers bookmark in the left-hand menu.

This week the social network began suggesting additional offers in the My Offers section of the site. Beneath offers that users have already claimed, users may see “Recommended Offers” from other retailers that have promotions going on. Facebook is perhaps hoping to turn this section into a destination for deal-hunting consumers.

(more…)

E-commerce customers who were targeted with Facebook Exchange remarketing ads after first seeing a traditional Facebook ad generated 89 percent more in sales revenue than customers who entered the remarketing pool through non-Facebook channels, according to a study by Nanigans.

In a four-month study of an online retailer that generated $1.2 million in sales revenue from 5,188 customers who were retargeted through the Facebook Exchange, Nanigans found that the combination of FBX ads and native Facebook audience targeting through the Ads API was more effective in generating sales than either tactic alone.

(more…)

Facebook is testing a new version of its Offers product, which gives users the option to shop immediately or get a reminder before the promotion ends. The interface also lets users decide if and when to share the offer with friends.

The new implementation could be more effective in leading to direct sales for retailers, while helping users remember to take advantage of the offers they’re interested in and giving them more control over how their activity is shared.

A Facebook spokesperson says the company is working with a few global retailers for this test, but for now other pages aren’t affected and their offers will continue to appear in the original format.

(more…)

Social commerce platform Payvment today announced it will be ending service on Feb. 28, after nearly three and a half years of powering Facebook storefronts through which users could buy items from merchants.

Payvment will refer its merchants to transfer their Facebook stores to another social commerce platform, Ecwid. Payvment says it has sold to another company, but it has not announced which one. It denied that it was being acquired by Ecwid, saying that deal is just a solution for its merchants. TechCrunch reports that accounting software company Intuit is the buyer, though Payvment has not officially announced the acquisition. [Update 1/28/13 12:30 p.m. - Intuit has confirmed to TechCrunch that it acquired the Payvment team.]
(more…)

Facebook announced hundreds of new gifts have been made available through the new Facebook Gifts product. It has also begun to roll out Facebook Gifts to more users.

The new partners include retailers such as babyGAP, Fab, Brookstone and Lindt among others. Users can now gift subscriptions to television and music services Hulu Plus, Pandora, Rdio and more. Users will also soon be able to buy wine from Robert Mondavi Winery and Chandon through Gifts. By expanding its inventory, Facebook can attract more users to buy things for their friends and develop its e-commerce business.

Retailers can work with Facebook and offer their goods through Gifts, allowing users to share these products on their Timeline. By doing this, they are receiving more brand recognition and essentially an endorsement from users. Facebook has not revealed what percentage of sales it is taking from Gifts.

Facebook Gifts, introduced in September, is currently only available to select users in the U.S. More recently, Gifts has been made available to users through the mobile application. The social network has also included the ability for users to make charitable contributions in a friend’s name earlier this month.

Facebook hasn’t given up on Collections — the test feature that looked similar to Pinterest and allowed users to “want” or “collect” products that pages posted — but it temporarily removed all posts and activity related to it.

TechCrunch noticed that Collections were no longer visible on pages or users’ Timelines and confirmed with Facebook that the initial test period for the product is over, but the feature hasn’t been killed. The social network is looking to improve the product and create a mobile component, so it decided to shut down the existing version in the meantime.

“Product development on Collections has not stopped,” Facebook told TechCrunch. “Instead we have completed our initial test of Collections and are now analyzing the data to inform product development. For many of the product tests we do, we periodically pause the test to assess how to best progress with the product’s rollout.”

With Collections, Facebook worked with Michael Kors, Pottery Barn, Wayfair, Victoria’s Secret, Neiman Marcus, Smith Optics and Fab.com to test several variations of the feature. Collections posts featured large images that users could hover over and take an action. For some users that action was “Want,” though others saw “Collect” or “Like.” Clicking one of these buttons would save items to a section of users’ Timelines, either called “Products” or “Wishlist” depending which cohort users were in. Facebook also tested whether these lists should be visible to friends only or friends of friends.

When users browsed a collection, there were links directing users to buy the items from the retailer’s website. Collection posts also include native Facebook features such as Like, share, and comment. The social network is likely looking at all of these signals to understand engagement and purchase behavior.

This year Facebook has begun taking a vertical-by-vertical approach to developing products for marketers. Collections is an example of something seemingly developed with retailers and e-commerce sites specifically in mind.

While Collections is still being developed, retailers can work with third parties to offer similar functionality with Open Graph and News Feed apps. ShopIgniter, for instance, gives companies the option to create customizable interactive posts, including product collections, video showcases and limited-time storefronts with exclusive offers. See an example below.

Lish.com, the social product discovery website by Payvment, comes out of beta today for users and merchants.

Lish.com surfaces the top trending items among the more than 4 million products across Payvment’s seller network of more than 180,000 merchants. The site integrates Facebook Open Graph to share users’ feelings about different products. Payvment is a Facebook e-commerce platform that has been around since 2009, regularly releasing new features and products that take advantage of the latest opportunities and best practices for social shopping.

Lish.com, which launched in beta in August, receives twice as many daily visitors as Payvment’s previous mall experience on Facebook.com. The company says its Open Graph integration through emoticons such as “smiley-face” and “frowny-face” drives three times as much engagement and social exposure as the “Want” and “Own” buttons it tested earlier in the year. Lish is also optimized for mobile and thus generates 6X the amount of mobile traffic to Payvment stores than before the new launch.

Sellers can create their own branded URLs on Lish.com, and Payvment will offer a single dashboard for them to manage their Lish.com and Facebook storefronts. Creating a store on Lish and Payvment is free, though the company also offers premium accounts with more analytics, promotion features and the ability to have multiple admins.

To read more about what Payvment learned about F-commerce and why it launched Lish, read our earlier story here.