The well-known online social networking giant Facebook (FB, Financial) is planning to offer competition to its peers such as Amazon.com (AMZN, Financial) in the ecommerce space and with such a motive in mind on March 13 the tech company announced the acquisition of online shopping search engine TheFind. Analysts are of the opinion that this recent acquisition will aid Facebook in growing bigger in the commercial advertising space as an online shopping site where Facebook users can go ahead and buy directly what they desire to purchase without the need of leaving their Facebook page. Let’s plunge in to find out the likely benefits of such an acquisition for Facebook in the long run.
Marking the start to a new ballgame
TheFind, founded around 2006, is an online search site that allows users to compare prices of a product online. For example if a user enters a generic product name all prices available from online as well as local store sellers are displayed by its e-commerce platform for the user to go ahead with the price selection for making the purchase. It is notable that TheFind has about 500 million products indexed across nearly 500,000 stores –Â this means that it is a perfect search engine to look into for comparing widespread prices of any product before making a final decision linked to the product purchase.
Now with Facebook buying this technology of TheFind, the former surely stands to gain. It is mentionable that just in the past month Facebook launched the special ad unit that would highlight specific products that a merchant is interested in selling to online customers. Now this acquisition will help Facebook in not only matching a company to a specific user but also in making sure the products exhibited in the ads are the ones the user is likely to buy. This way, Facebook’s foothold in the online advertising space will get enhanced in the long run.
This is not the first attempt of Facebook to grow in the commercial advertising domain; in the past few years it has courted several developers and advertisers in the pursuit of app install ads. Hence Facebook commented on this acquisition, “We’re excited to welcome TheFind to Facebook. TheFind’s talented team has built a successful search engine that connects people to products. Together, we believe we can make the Facebook ads experience even more relevant and better for consumers. Our business is about connecting people with the topics, companies, brands and increasingly products they care about, and we look forward to doing that with TheFind on board…”
Facebook looks happy that it will be able to serve its user base better by showing prices of products based on user’s demographic profile and shopping preferences, thus raking in more revenue from the direct emarketers with whom it enjoys advertising agreements linked to online shopping of their products while visiting the Facebook page. Users will now see customized ads based on their demographic and user profile on Facebook since one of the TheFind’s features is that it attempts to highlight online and local stores basing its search results on “your social profile.”
Going ahead
Though the details of this transaction have still not been made public, such news did take the Facebook stock in a positive direction last Friday. It is being presumed that the TheFind purchase reflects the motivation of Facebook to become a niche player rather than its interest in grabbing more customers or users at a single go. This latest acquisition signifies a concrete step taken by the networking giant to improve its stand in the ecommerce advertising space where it hopes to create a niche amid continuous competition that is looming large in the social networking space from other players such as Twitter (TWTR, Financial). Let’s wait and watch how this recent acquisition that has been confirmed by TheFind team in a blog post last Friday offers better shape to Facebook for serving its users with better advertising options that they find useful while completing a product’s price search. So let’s stay tuned
