Australian startup, Moluko, has launched its ‘Shopping Cart for FaceBook’ application allowing online retailers to easily sell products through their FaceBook fan-pages.
Along with the app they’ve also launched their own hopes of becoming a key player in the march towards turning the social network into the web’s top e-commerce platform.
As co-founder, Hendro Wijaya, explains, the rationale behind the creation of Moluko was quite simple:
“Prior to Moluko, businesses used Facebook Fan Pages mainly for marketing purposes. Once customers decided to buy the products they then needed to be redirected to an external website to complete the check-out processes. This gap in the funnel often confused customers and affected the retailer’s bottom line due to cancelled sales.”
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Wijaya also sees another interesting use case for Moluko:
“Aside from helping businesses streamline their operations, we believe it will help small businesses eliminate the need for having their own websites. altogether. Instead, they can focus on growing their businesses solely through social networks like FaceBook. We started to see this last year and believe the trend will continue in 2010”
They aren’t the first startup to try and tackle this problem. Payvment and ShopTab provide similar services, but Wijaya believes that Moluko’s user experience is far better. He also believes that Moluko’s commitment towards innovation (they’ve already developed a list of secret features that they’re busy coding) will see them come out in front. That having been said, Wijaya is keen to see how the service is used in the real world before deciding which of those features to release.
The current version of Moluko supports Paypal as its payment gateway with more options expected to come.
Two types of payment plans are being offered: free for displaying 6 products and $15/month for unlimited products.
Trying the service out is easy too. Just follow the simple instruction on their website and you’re away.
There’s certainly no doubt that FaceBook will be a major player in e-commerce in future. It will be interesting to see if Moluko will be able to help them get there.
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