On February 12 2011 we released an extra module FacebookTab which allows opening X-Cart store on your personal Facebook pages. The goal was to show products right on your fan page (in tab) without redirecting customers to a separate canvas page. The module was developed based on FBML technology that at that time was the only solution to display content in tab.
Meanwhile Facebook announced that their tabs started working with iFrame technology as well. However since we already had the FBML version we decided to concentrate on it and create a new product on iFrame logic in the future.
FacebookTab has given many of you an excellent chance to sell your products on Facebook thus convert your X-Cart into f-commerce cart. Also we developed the special application for easy connection x-cart store with facebook page. And this powerful solution is available only at $95, or even less with our special offers. I hope all of us believe that this investment was a very good deal. All this time we have been working on FacebookTab to enhance its functionality, in cooperation with FBML development team, submitting issues to the Facebook bugtracker to sort out major problems with FBML. And all that amount of work from our side, in addition to FacebookTab, costs our clients a one time fee.
On September 30 2011 Facebook announced that they are going to stop FBML support starting from January 01 2012 and totally remove FBML technology on June 2012:
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/568/
I'd say it was to our regret considering how much efforts we've put into our beloved child FacebookTab.
Anyway the progress is moving towards the future. We understand we have to create another product, now based on iFrame logic. No time for regret! Since then our team has been working hard on this brand new solution. We started developing it from scratch. It's a totally new technology and new code. We has invested our time, money, resources (I pray not health!) in this project. And today we are proud to launch the new service called f-Commerce Go.
It will be a SaaS freemium model. The integration module for X-Cart will be available for free download to all clients, and surely there will be a special Facebook application to connect your X-Cart store with your Facebook page as it was with FacebookTab.
We will be offering two f-Commerce Go plans:
1. Basic plan - free of charge, includes display of featured products on Facebook page. Though it's only for featured products I'm sure it's a exciting news for the X-Cart community.
Example here -
http://www.facebook.com/fcommerce.go?sk=app_165931960160897
2. Silver plan - paid. The subscribers will get a more advanced solution that will support many features like as follows:
- Full store stock
- Categories browsing and products listing in categories
- Products search feature
- "Add to cart" and minicart
- A tag for orders from Facebook and search filter in X-Cart admin area
- "Like" and "Send" buttons for all products in Facebook catalog
- Facebook comments for all products in Facebook catalog
- Product detailed page with all the supported functionality such as Detailed Images, Products options, Related products, and others
- Bestsellers products listing
- WYSIWYG editor to put custom HTML text on shop start page
- Taxes, SpecialOffers, ExtraFields are available for Facebook catalog
Example -
http://www.facebook.com/xcart?sk=app_165931960160897
Silver plan will cost $105 for 6-month subscription or $195 for 1-year. We are going to launch this service at the beginning of March.
From this date, though reluctantly, we stop selling FacebookTab. But we will continue supporting the application and module until Facebook removes FBML technology completely. For those clients who purchased FacebookTab module starting from January 01 2012, we will do product exchange to the f-Commerce Go service.
If you are interested in the software and would like to use the new service, please, visit
this page send us your contact email (HelpDesk login so that our staff identifies you as an existing client). As soon as we launch the service we will contact you directly.