consumer

A quick report over on The Huffington Post says that when an eCommerce site has a Facebook “like” button placed next to products that might be deemed embarrassing or personal, customers shy away from the products.

A study by the “University of Miami School of Business Administration, Empirica Research and StyleCaster Media Group,” (Seriously? Look, S.H.I.E.L.D. shortened their moniker!) indicated that when “like” buttons were near sensitive purchase options, customers were 25% less willing to buy.

The problem?

When the study rats fessed as to why they veered away from pages with ‘like’ and ‘tweet’ buttons is because they had concerns they being watched, and purchase choices were modified on the fly.

OH…

On the flipside, if a person was proud of what they were purchasing, there was a 25% increase in the probability of using the page with the social buttons.

The recommendation was for businesses to pull buttons from their ‘questionable’ product pages. Questionable being not necessarily what you might think, since products like Clearasil were noted.

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Can You Blame Them?

All this time, we’ve been very aware that whatever we do in regards to Facebook is tracked, monitored and shared.

The games you sign up for access your info AND the info of those who you are friends with.  It’s part of how the platform can be free for consumers to use.

But with everything you do shared on the network, I get the concerns.  Heck, one day I ‘liked’ the Victoria’s Secret page and I got pummeled by my female associates asking how my wife felt about that… it was brutal, and non-stop for most of the day.

And yes, that made me very paranoid from that point on about what I ‘liked.’

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