Social shopping: Amazon and Facebook partner

The recently announced partnership between Amazon and Facebook is immense!  As the social web continues to mature we can expect to see more and more of these socially enabled shopping experiences.

From a brand point of view the partnership is totally win win, Facebook are able to showcase their connect capability on one of the largest platforms online, while Amazon have a killer feature through their ability to bring friends together around the products they sell.

What really sets this partnership apart though is the value the consumer receives, the key benefits that I see are as follows;

• Explore friends and families likes and interests giving you a more valuable gauge on a product
• Access to more personal recommendations based on your interests and favorites from your Facebook profile
• Integrated birthday reminders, thanks the lord!
• Ability to easily access wish lists and gifting recommendations making those birthday reminders easy to action and Christmas shopping less painful

Beyond the features it seems that Facebook and Amazon have taken the right approach around the elephant in the room, privacy.  Access is determined by how much you have selected to share on your Facebook profile and no individual purchases are shared.  Obviously the all important Amazon account data remains off limits so there are no financial risks involved in signing up.

Currently the Facebook integration is confined to a single page but as the partnership evolves I’d love to see the connect capability pushed out through the general shopping platform giving consumers a seamless and natural social experience.