You remember wanting to send your first gift via the Facebook Gift Shop app, right? Your friend had a birthday and you wanted to be the first to post to their wall. Oh, you have an option to send a gift, sweet, now you can be the first AND send a little virtual present. Pretty neat process to say the least and man did people LOVE it. Just announced was that Facebook was removing that option from the site. It’s ok, don’t worry, you can still send happy birthday wishes normally.
The gift shop was popular and it never seemed to go away. You always saw the little icons on people’s profiles even long after the “new car” feeling went away. But Facebook is ready to move and in doing so, they figured the gift shop should be retired. With Facebook wanting to keep a fresh and new look to it’s very popular site, by updating one’s homepage with new options or features, it seemed that gift shop might stay.
Not a big deal and there is nothing to worry about. If anything, the gift shop was a good beta test to what is called e-commerce on Facebook. The virtual money that you can now purchase and use on Facebook is alive and doing very, very well. It was estimated that Facebook made over $35 million with the gift shop, so why get rid of it?
Right now, Facebook takes a 30% cut of third party transactions, so it only made sense that they take the gift shop outside and not pay to keep that part of Facebook alive. So, now Facebook can concentrate more on other things, like messing with your homepage layout.
There is an alternative to facebook coming this September. It’s called somethingcoolhappened.com. You will be able to upload videos, pictures and stories of cool things that happen to you or someone you know. You will also be able to create your own custom avatar! It’s going to be very cool. Check it out!