In my previous article, in the series of Linkedin for anti-fraud professionals, i mentioned about the company i found on iStart.Company which started as the anti-fraud social media converted itself to e-commerce company. Their reasons were quite obvious. Social media requires long term funding support where as e-commerce site helps in quick realization of income.
When i was interacting with the team of Fraudexpress, i realized that they face the branding challenge. They ran a campaign on Facebook which got a decent response but not a single item was sold as their products were meant for the professionals and facebook pages were liked by the students, friends and their relatives, who were least interested in buying their products. There we realized that if the fraudexpress website can be integrated with the professional networking website like Linkedin, then it may change the fortunes of the company. Linkedin need the success stories to get more competitive. The simplest thing that they can offer is the “In-Commerce”. Where the catalog can be integrated with linkedin and for every checkout done using the Linkedin Payment gateway, the site owner will have to shelve out some portion of the revenues for Linkedin.
Linkedin can develope the advertising revenues around this model where the catalog can reach out to the global audience.
Facebook, one of the biggest competitors of Linkedin realized the power of e-commerce and they came up with the tools which help the companies to get into F-commerce.However, I have not seen any such development on Linkedin.
If there is any such development at Linkedin, I would be the first one to buy it for my portfolio companies which sell the professional products like the books or the research papers.
