F-Commerce à la Française: La Redoute and SNCF (screenshots)
0“Selling tickets on Facebook is a waste of time” says Pierre Matuchet, associate CTO at French railways SNCF.
Nevertheless, French railways has just added a natty Facebook app to its Facebook page that allows groups of friends discuss and plan group trips – and then go to the SNCF booking website to book up tickets.
Called “Petits Voyages Entre Amis” (a play on words from the French title of the film Shallow Grave), the iFrame app has been created by SNCF digital team “VSC Technologies“, and allows users to create a wiki-style trip planner page in Facebook and invite friends to participate. Users can add loyalty cards, mark the trip as public (allowing access to their whole social circle) or private (invitees only), and then search and discuss options for hotels, activities and transport – and get a price. To buy though users get thrown out of the app and bumped over to the e-commerce website. Shame.
Over at the Facebook page of catalogue-shopping giant La Redoute, things have gone app-tastic too. La Redoute was one of the the first major retailers to set up a storefront on Facebook. That’s disappeared but now there’s a shiny new group-gifting and gift-list app called ‘Un Jour, Une Liste’ (one day, one list). Users can create an event (e.g. a birthday) for themselves or a friend and invite friends to contribute, who can pay by credit card on Facebook, choosing if they so wish to put their money towards a La Redoute item in the list. The gift recipient then gets to choose to take the cash or buy the products. The iFrame app was created by Hobbynote, a social media agency close to La Redoute’s Lille headquarters.
Checkout the screenshots below, and watch the two short intro videos to the Frenchy Facebook apps
