Asos’s move to make its Facebook page transactional signals exciting opportunities for retailers to leverage their social network ‘fans’ into hard sales

Why are we talking about it?

Online fashion giant Asos opened a fully transactional Facebook site last week. Visitors to the etail giant’s Facebook page can now browse its entire catalogue and purchase without leaving the social network.

Why has Asos set up the shop?

Asos already has more than 400,000 fans on Facebook and is keen to convert those followers into sales. Some sectors have already taken advantage of Facebook for shopping. Games developer Zynga has said most of its turnover is generated from consumers buying games credits via Facebook, for example.

Damian Hanson, chief executive of social and mobile commerce consultant One Iota, says: “Retailers have an amazing opportunity to leverage the ‘fans’ they have generated. They need to start turning social conversations into conversions by taking the shop to the customer in an environment they spend the majority of their spare time in.”

Has it been done before?

Asos is the first major UK retailer to launch a transactional site on Facebook. There are a handful in the US already, such as JC Penney, which opened in mid-December.

Will others follow suit?

Where Asos leads, others are bound to follow. Hanson predicts that 10% to 15% of the top 100 retailers will have fully transactional Facebook pages by the end of 2011.

How can retailers harness the power of Facebook?

Many UK retailers have a presence on Facebook - 65 of the top 100 retailers have fan pages. But only four of those 65 have a click-through to their own website to buy.

There are other ways to harness Facebook’s strength though. Argos recently put its entire catalogue on Facebook and Twitter with a click-through to its site for shoppers.

Argos was also among the first to sign up to Facebook’s Deals service, which offers location-based promotions to users of the mobile tool Places. The service identifies the location of the user via their mobile phone using its Places app. Facebook then checks its database and alerts the user to offers in the area. Debenhams, Benetton and O2 have also signed up to the service.

As well as converting existing fans, customers could also become word of mouth sellers for retailers on Facebook. Buyers could post their latest purchases to their wall for all their friends to see. Hanson also believes that transactional sites could benefit from the Groupon phenomenon with retailers offering group discounts for bulk purchases of particular items.