Press Release: Social Commerce Meets Search with TheFind.com and Facebook Intergration

SAN FRANCISCO– At an intimate dinner with executives from Facebook and Sephora last night, TheFind unveiled a distributed social commerce integration that gives people the freedom and control to personalize their shopping experience on TheFind using Facebook.

“From a brand and retailer’s perspective, ‘Like Love’ takes the Facebook Like feature to another level”

“Shopping is an inherently social experience made better with your friends,” said Justin Osofsky, director of strategic partnerships at Facebook. “TheFind is providing a relevant and personalized shopping experience by giving people a way to use their likes from around the web to customize product search results. They’re taking an innovative approach to build social into the core of the shopping experience.”

As of today, people can log into TheFind using Facebook to see personalized search results based on the stores and brands they’ve connected to across the Web by clicking the Facebook ‘Like’ button. Shoppers will benefit from search results that more closely mirror their tastes along with the capability to see which stores and brands their friends like. Likes will only be shared when a person takes the explicit action of clicking the Like button, giving shoppers complete control over what is shared with friends.

The login with Facebook feature allows people to easily use their Facebook information to establish an account on TheFind and quickly personalize their shopping searches. Once an item, such as a brand or a store, is liked – whether that like occurs on TheFind, Facebook or elsewhere on the Web – that like becomes part of both the person’s shopping profile on TheFind and their personal profile on Facebook. For shoppers, the use of likes to quickly create a shopping profile makes it easy to filter relevant products through a social lens. As with other instances of the like button, when a shopper likes a brand, that brand can publish updates and deals directly to the shopper’s News Feed, spreading what is being dubbed “Like Love.”

“The Like button provides a lightweight way to endorse items across the web, providing value to both consumers and retailers,” said Siva Kumar, CEO of TheFind. “A customized experience based on what you’ve liked means you can quickly narrow nearly 50,000 results for ‘short black dress’ down to just a few dozen from your favorites; similarly, knowing that your friend likes a specific designer or boutique can influence your purchase in a way that is both personal and inherently social.”

“From a brand and retailer’s perspective, ‘Like Love’ takes the Facebook Like feature to another level,” said Julie Bornstein, SVP of Sephora. “Not only does it strengthen TheFind as a resource for sending us qualified shopping traffic, but it gives new customers confidence in trying our brand when they see that their friends like us, and it also provides another destination where we can gather new ‘likes’ and spread the Sephora network further.

TheFind, which sends well-qualified leads to more than 150,000 stores each month, pointed out that the stores and brands that have already established a Facebook presence would have a clear head start as ‘Like Love’ spreads. “In order to accrue the benefits from shoppers who discover your store or brand and want to Like you, they first have to have something to actually Like, and that means a Facebook Page that is maintained by the store or brand owner,” said Ron Levi, TheFind’s vice president of product. Levi also noted that merchants who do not currently have a Facebook Page would be well served to create one before the holiday shopping rush and register that page – for free – within TheFind’s Merchant Center in order to fully benefit from ‘Like Love’.

Included in this release, TheFind also demonstrated a series of help screens to assist shoppers in further understanding these new social shopping experiences. As with all websites, connecting through Facebook and using the like and share functionality is entirely opt-in. Shoppers on TheFind can also personalize their experience discreetly on TheFind by simply saving their favorite stores, brands, and recent searches and product views to TheFind without publishing any of that information back to Facebook or other external sites.

Perhaps foreshadowing future enhancements, TheFind’s Kumar noted that “you can begin to imagine how we might leverage the tastes of your friends or even celebrities and domain experts to make product and gift recommendations based on the things they have chosen to like and share. Stay tuned.”