Social Commerce

Facebook is making a new play for retailers. Yesterday, Facebook debuted a system titled "dynamic ads for retail" that will use personalization and location data to allow merchants to only serve promos of products that are actually available at a chain brand's location. Adweek reports retailers currently testing the new program are Argos, Macy's, Target…

Facebook announced yesterday that its Messenger bots can now accept payments natively without sending users to an external website. The credit card info people already have stored in Facebook or Messenger can be used to instantly make purchases in bots that are part of the new closed beta the developers can apply for. Total Retail's…

Pinterest on Tuesday unveiled new features to facilitate shopping on the social network, as the platform pushes to become an e-commerce hub. One of the most notable changes to the platform is the addition of a virtual shopping bag. When "pinners" are browsing the site, they can add items to their virtual shopping bag and…

eBay is running a new promotion this summer in partnership with Twitter to generate more mobile app users. The promotion, titled "The Summer of Choice," kicks off June 24, when eBay shoppers will begin tweeting dueling deals. Ecommerce Bytes explains that Twitter users will have three days to vote on the dueling deals, at which time…

Find out what major retailers took the pledge to close the gender wage gap; which e-tailer Bed Bath & Beyond just acquired; how Office Depot and Staples are stepping up their back-to-school fight; and how Facebook is entering the brick-and-mortar space.

Sephora is continuing its efforts to tap into new ways of monetizing millennial-friendly mobile platforms, enabling its Snapchat followers to purchase products featured in live stories by taking a screenshot and downloading the ShopStyle application. The beauty giant, which announced the news on Snapchat last week, invited followers to shop a slew of popular cosmetics featured…

You don’t normally buy a sweater or a pair of sneakers on Facebook. But the giant social media company is becoming the biggest factor in retail nobody is thinking about. “You read the analyst reports and talk to CEOs, and a lot of the conversation is comparison to other retailers and to Amazon,” Tom Andrews of…

Ever since the online market exploded, consumers have been flocking to online stores in droves, which naturally has hurt the shopping mall as we know it. It’s driven a number of stores out of business, and it threatens the health of thousands more. Retailers are taking steps to ensure the online market doesn’t throw them…

Twitter has curtailed product development on its “Buy” button and product pages and shifted its commerce team into other divisions within the company, BuzzFeed News has learned. A number of members of Twitter’s roughly 25-person commerce team have left the company, and those who remain now largely work on two separate product teams: customer service and…

When Pinterest and Instagram introduced click-to-buy features last summer, the hope was that they would help brands turn mobile browsers into shoppers. After all, mobile represented just 16 percent of e-commerce dollars in 2015, compared to 84 percent on desktop, according to comScore. But these buy buttons haven’t quite taken off as hoped. They generate very…