A San Fran­cis­co start-up wants to put the com­merce in F- Commerce.

These days, the big f‑word on Face­book is “F‑commerce,” or, in two words, “Face­book Commerce.”

As weak­en­ing of the stock has shown, Face­book may not be as valu­able as every­one ini­tial­ly thought, due in part to it’s inabil­i­ty to also be an effec­tive com­merce web­site. Cur­rent­ly even fan pages of brands still must trans­port cus­tomers away from Face­book to anoth­er web­site so they can make a pur­chase. How­ev­er, a San Fran­cis­co-based start­up called Sol­dsie is look­ing to change all of that. Last week they launched a social media point-of-sale pro­gram that allows busi­ness­es to sell on Face­book sole­ly by using Face­book com­ments. Accord­ing to TechCrunch.com, the com­pa­ny soft-launched in May and has now reached over one mil­lion dol­lars in trans­ac­tions across a net­work of 75 dif­fer­ent busi­ness­es, run by their social media man­agers. With those types of results in such a short amount of time, it appears Face­book Com­merce may actu­al­ly be possible.

How Sol­dsie Works

As with all great new tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments, like Pay­pal or Face­book itself, the way in which Sol­dsie works is sim­ple. All cus­tomers have to do is go to a company’s fan page, which fea­tures pho­tos and descrip­tions of dif­fer­ent prod­ucts the com­pa­ny is sell­ing. If a cus­tomer wants to buy that item, all they have to do is type “sold” into the com­ments sec­tion. Of course, they will have to sign up for the appli­ca­tion first to be able to buy items through these Face­book fan pages—personal infor­ma­tion like an email will be tak­en for each Sol­dsie user. They will then be billed via Pay­pal or be able to enter in their cred­it card infor­ma­tion as an option to be kept on file for future purchases.

The Com­ing F‑Boom

As the past sum­mer has shown, peo­ple will pur­chase items via the Sol­dsie plat­form on Face­book, as it is as con­ve­nient as buy­ing any oth­er item online, if not more so. It will also encour­age more impulse buy­ing, lead­ing to big­ger F‑commerce num­bers. This means Sol­dsie will most like­ly grow rapid­ly, once a num­ber of major retail­ers agree to use the new plat­form. Even if the major brands don’t sign off on Sol­dsie, small busi­ness­es will help the new plat­form to grow steadi­ly in the future.

How It Will Expand

Sol­dsie will not only expand via cus­tomer base but also busi­ness base. This means it will need teams who act as con­tent man­agers and teams who act as com­mu­ni­ty man­agers, cre­at­ing a sort of eBay com­mu­ni­ty with­in the Face­book com­mu­ni­ty itself. As the soft-launch has already shown, peo­ple will buy up in-demand items very quick­ly and then auc­tion them off through Face­book or oth­er web­sites. All this is ter­ri­to­ry that Sol­dsie is poised to expand into in the future.