As a business owner, you can't ignore Facebook.  It has nearly 600 million active users and is the busiest, most visited website on planet Earth.  Many businesses have begun to create Facebook pages for their businesses and have invited their customers to "like" their page.  By liking pages, customers can easily share things about the business with their friends.  It's another way for your loyal customers to tell their friends about you.

A growing number of Facebook businesses are starting to offer shopping right on Facebook.  This allows customers to purchase a product right on Facebook.  This is usually done as a link or a tab on the Facebook company page. An example of this is the NBA Facebook page.

There are many advantages to selling your products and offering your shopping cart system on  Facebook:

• All the shopping done within the comfort of the Facebook website
• Customers can "like" and recommend products easily
• Customers can easily share on their wall what they just bought with their friends (by publishing items to their wall)
• You can provide special discounts to people that "like" your Facebook page

In order to extend your e-commerce website to accommodate a Facebook shopping experience, a few things must be created and modified. First, a developer creates a skinnier, Facebook-friendly version of your website.  Facebook applications look best at 740 pixels wide (most websites are optimized to fit nicely in 960-1024 pixels).  The graphical elements may need to be modified to give the site a more Facebook-friendly view.  It is also recommended to place Facebook links to the tabs of your page in your design to make it easy for customers to jump back the wall, videos, photos, and other areas of your Facebook page.

Next, the developer creates a Facebook application for your business.  This Facebook application is software written using Facebook's markup language, FBML.  FBML is very close to HTML, but has many tags that are specific to Facebook (such as displaying a list of your friends).  The Facebook application will access the Facebook version of your website (that's about 740 pixels wide).  This allows you to maintain one website but have a different view for customers shopping from Facebook vs coming direct to your website.  Once the Facebook application is complete, it can be registered with Facebook so that it is accessible by anyone with a Facebook account.  Finished Facebook applications have their own unique URL, such as http://applications.facebook.com/nbastore (for the NBA's online store).

With your website design updated and your Facebook application in place, add a link to your Facebook application URL from your Facebook page.  This can be done by creating a nice graphic inviting visitors to shop, and placing that graphic on a tab of your Facebook page. 

By making your e-commerce website available to your Facebook fan base, you can experience more sales and find new customers.  With the right web developer, it's easy to transform your site into a Facebook application.

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