Facebook may be one of the hottest online properties at the moment, but not everything it touches is turning to gold it seems. Reports out detail how large shopping businesses such as Gap and Game Stop have cancelled their Facebook shopping pages, less than a year after they were launched.

We know Facebook as the place to socialise, to keep track of events and to learn the happenings of our many ‘Friends’. But they are keen for us to look at it as a hub for shopping as well, which would prove to be a massive financial windfall for the company should they succeed. Things, however, are not going well.

Rise and Fall

A number of ‘big brands’ launched Facebook shopping front ends to a fanfare a year or so ago. Amongst the biggest were The Gap and Game Stop, two huge offline brands who also have their own online stores. They saw Facebook shops as a chance to get people shopping ‘where they live’ so to speak.

Already these brands had a presence on Facebook, with millions of people ‘liking’ their pages, allowing them to interact. So being able to use these channels to drive traffic to a store front without ever leaving Facebook would seem like a natural fit. After all people hang out at shopping malls and buy, so online they hang out at Facebook – they would be buying there too.

However things didn’t go according to plan. Whilst they may have access to millions through their pages, and millions more via advertising channels within Facebook, it seems that these store fronts were far from a success.

Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru put it best by saying that far from trying to sell to people hanging out at a shopping mall, it was more akin to ‘trying to sell to people hanging out in a bar’. It seems that with so much focus on interaction and socialising, people are not in a buying mood when they are on Facbook.

Of course that is not to say that big brands are suddenly flooding away from Facebook, far from it in fact. All maintain and actively grow their fans lists or ‘likes’, and many still pay good money for advertising to people via the Facebook advertising program. It’s just that, for now, brands are shelving plans to have store fronts on Facebook until someone can create a model that actually works.

For now Facebook is likely to continue to be another advertising channel for gaining new customers, increasing brand recognition, and promoting special offers. But with such a huge customer base no doubt brands will continue to experiment with different sales models online, so don’t count out a return of the Facebook store front just yet.

Until then it seems that the good money is in the driving of traffic to fan pages to get the all important likes. After which messages from that channel appear in peoples time lines, allowing promotional opportunities, such as a Straight Talk promo code, to appear, which gets people taking advantage of them, and sharing with their friends, increasing word of mouth.