Privacy concerns hinder Facebook commerce

Last month a Havas Media Social/Lightspeed Research survey found that many British consumers don't shop via social networks because of security concerns. Even if a special offer was featured on a brand's social network page, most would prefer to redeem that offer on the brand's official website.

New research from marketing communications agency JWT echoes the Havas/Lightspeed research. It found that almost 80% of adults in the UK and US worry that Facebook isn't a secure environment in which to shop online.

Three-quarters said they "wouldn't use a shopping application on Facebook because of concerns that it could compromise my privacy--e.g., shared with third parties" or that Facebook wasn't secure enough to make purchases on.

A surprising statistic from JWT's findings is that Millennials were the most concerned about privacy for direct shopping via Facebook (81%) compared to Gen X (75%) and even Boomers (79%).

Many of these hurdles are the same ones retailers encountered when they first ventured into e-commerce more than a decade ago," says JWTs "Social Commerce" report.

"As they experiment with F-commerce, brands can look at the lessons from that time period for guidance on how to overcome these challenges and ease consumer concerns."

Tags: consumer insight, F-commerce, Facebook commerce, onine shopping, research, social commerce, social network