We’ve been talking a lot with our retail clients about how to effectively add content and community aspects to their commerce sites to increase traffic, conversion rates and average order size.  Yesterday the WSJ had a great piece on Target adding content and today they covered the top community aspect being considered by many retailers – Facebook Connect.   

We’ve been working for over a year with several retail partners to test numerous variations on Facebook Connect integrations to see which approaches will lead to the largest increases in traffic, conversion rate and average order size.  It turns out that a key factor is how deep the integration is to the product detail information and product imagery.  If you are going to share something with a friend – it needs to be very clear what the item is (color, size, syle, price) and be associated with the right image.  A link to a product detail page or just an image do not perform as well.  

The second key determinant is the clarity of the call to action for the friend and the ease of us.  A quick thumbs up or down works very well in addition to a free text box.    

We believe that in 2009 a major retailer will make a very successful deployment of social shopping using Facebook Connect and there will be a rush of followers.  Do you agree or disagree?  Please share your thoughts in the comments.