No longer all about e-commerce in an age where f-commerce is soon to be the bigger seller.

It is no secret that there is a marked integration between social media and the e-commerce environment so there is no time to hesitate where your digital PR and marketing is concerned.

As noted many times over, social media has long been a strategic element within online retailing, long before the marketing term for this activity became fashionable. Yet as E-consultancy  so aptly draws upon, which is best: adopting social media to assist in selling, or solely relying on selling through social media?

There is, without doubt, the potential for a rise in “f-commerce”, or in other words, Facebook commerce. Of course, there is the tendency to not fully realise the commercial nature of Facebook, however with 400million active users there is a money-making platform available and the site is incahoots by publicly searching for ways to exploit this.

This is all very plausible when considering that only a few weeks ago there was news that the company had generated a whopping $635m during 2009 and could well be on track to turn over a billion dollars by the end of the year.

With this, consider the opportunities as Facebook relies to a large extent on display advertising and wishes to refine this in an attempt to seriously increase revenues.

Interesting when one considers the partnership established between Facebook and PayPal just last year.

The new Facebook app SocialShop from BigCommerce really gives an insight into the direction the company is steering towards. Making it now possible for company’s with fan pages to actually display and sell products via Facebook, with the site acting as a throughway with the actual transaction being done on the sellers site. But as you’d expect, it shouldn’t be too long before Facebook handles the entire transaction.

Thus the scale of what can be done through f-commerce is astounding and as mentioned as, don’t hesitate!