While ecommerce has proved an effective and successful channel for companies' retail merchandising operations, not all online mediums have paid out.

Social networking giant Facebook offers retailers and companies access to its nearly 1 billion members. However, even these numbers couldn't help the network's attempt at social retail, "F-commerce," catch on.

According to a recent article from Bloomberg, major retailers such as Gap, JCPenney and Nordstrom have opened and closed shopping operations on the website within the past year, despite speculation that the site would soon rival Amazon and PayPal for business.

"There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop," Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research, told the source. "But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they're hanging out with their friends at the bar."

However, in an article for ZDNet, Emil Protalinski suggests that it may not be Facebook's fault. Retailers, he writes, need to learn to use the site correctly by building a service or feature that users will want to share with their friends.