Saturday, March 12, 2011

Social Commerce (2): Amazon’s Case Study

I wanted to go a little bit deeper in the topic of social commerce, and discuss further the article I found on how Amazon uses Facebook as a social commerce tool.

Amazon has become the leading company in the Internet retailing business thanks to its ability to adapt its commercial offer to one customer profile. Customization is a key factor, and they have been able to master it thanks to customers’ data base: They are expert in data mining.

But thanks to social commerce and Facebook data analysis (via your network of relatives), it will be able to go even further, analyzing what products your network buy and that you don’t.

One of the concrete example shown in this article, is that Amazon may give you appropriate recommendations for your friends’ birthday, and hence, having a customized offer right on time for the event…


It will be interesting to see actually how Amazon is able to leverage this new tool, and to see how both customers data and Facebook data can be combined for more efficiency.
But maybe the future of CRM and data mining will actually be to master these two very different entries of information and provide accurate analysis.
What do you think about it?