Zappos Proves the Model With Facebook Beacon

I made a purchase on Zappos.com this afternoon. Not a big deal — in fact, if you’re friends with me on Facebook, you may already know that.

Zappos was one of the original launch partners with Facebook Beacon. A few people protested this partnership, but having now lived through the Zappos-Beacon experience myself, I’m actually impressed with the way it was executed.

The experiences goes like this: As soon as you complete your purchase, you’re taken to a confirmation screen (pretty standard procedure). There, you’re given the option to share your purchase with your friends in one of several ways. I clicked through too quickly and didn’t get a screenshot of this step, but the options were essentially:

Share your exact purchase on Zappos.com with your friends
Share only the brand of your purchase on Zappos.com
Share only that you found “something cool” on Zappos.com
Do not share your purchase with your friends

For me, sharing the exact product or even the brand would have been a little much (see this quote for my thoughts on the matter). But I was more than happy to go on the record as a satisfied customer, so I went with Option #3. The fact that I had these three options is outstanding — it allows people to endorse Zappos and their purchase at whatever level they are comfortable with.

Having made my selection I was given another chance to confirm exactly what would be posted to my Facebook wall:

Zappos Facebook Beacon Confirmation

Great use of feedback to make sure I knew that something was happening (for more on why this is critical in any interface, check out Don Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things).

After that, I went to my Facebook profile to see the new post. But it wasn’t there. I was a little disappointed, but I would prefer no story to rampant unauthorized posts.

When I went to my Home page on Facebook, I understood why. Beacon was giving me one last chance to approve the Zappos story. This is also a crucial step: if I had decided to share my purchase on Zappos but had unknowingly been logged into Facebook as a different user (perhaps on a shared machine), that user would be able to deny the story before it was posted.

Zappos Beacon Final Confirmation

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the model for Facebook Beacon/Connect integration. Great work, Zappos.

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