by Dave Felipe, SortPrice.com

In many ways, 2010 will probably be looked back upon as the year that e-commerce came of age. Sure, online shopping has been around for quite awhile already, and there has never been a shortage of innovation and new technology in that arena. But last year witnessed the emergence of several trends within the industry that have profoundly changed how people shop and expanded the reach of e-commerce to even more online shoppers.

While the rise of daily deal sites such as Groupon and the rapid growth in popularity of mobile commerce can certainly be counted as important components of 2010’s e-commerce landscape, the biggest development was surely the social networking integration movement that really took off during the year.

This movement wasn’t born in 2010. SortPrice.com was involved well before last year – we launched our Facebook Store Application for retailers, a customized tool that lets them list and promote products right on their Facebook fan pages, back in the Fall of 2008. And since then, we’ve built Facebook stores for nearly 1,500 retailers total, more than anyone else in the industry.

But F-commerce, as it has come to be known, really arrived and established itself as the next great frontier in online shopping in 2010. Need proof?

As the longest-running tool of its kind on Facebook, with more active retail partners than anyone, the SortPrice Store Application has become an excellent barometer and example of F-commerce’s overall growth and success. Just take a look at some performance data that we compiled on the use of our application by retailers last year.

About 40 percent of the almost 1,500 retailers using our Store Application added it to their operations at some point during 2010. This clearly establishes 2010 as the year when hundreds of retailers, both Fortune 500 chains and smaller, niche merchants alike, recognized the potential that Facebook and other social networking resources held and finally decided to get in on the action.

That ‘action’ isn’t just limited to a few clearance items up for sale here and there on Facebook either.

There was more than $3.78 billion worth of merchandise on SortPrice-built Facebook stores alone last year, a staggering total to say the least. The 7.6 million products that our retail partners listed on Facebook last year represented a 60 percent increase over the total product count from 2009, yet another impressive example of growth.

That selection was a diverse one, as well. By the end of the year, we had approximately 53,000 specific product categories from 28 different industries across our Facebook stores. A consumer could conceivably find anything he or she was looking for—from apparel and computers to home and garden items and jewelry—by solely using our retailer’s Facebook stores.

Of course, just listing products on a Facebook fan page alone isn’t going to result in the kind of growth we saw in 2010.

We witnessed a strong commitment on the part of our retail partners to creatively market and promote the Facebook stores we built for them and that went a long way towards adding to their success. Those retailers who invest time and money in promoting their stores, in attracting and engaging a loyal set of fans through the use of contests, sales or simple daily interaction have gotten the most out of the F-commerce efforts and can expect the best results moving forward. Frankly, tangible F-commerce success is not possible without such efforts.

There was a steady stream of other new services and applications emerging in 2010, all designed to help retailers fold social networking sites, particularly Facebook, into their broader marketing and sales strategies. With dozens of companies now offering tools and more retailers realizing the value of tapping into social networking audiences, it is safe to say that 2010 was only the first of what should be many robust years for retailers engaged in F-commerce.

Dave Felipe heads up marketing, advertising and public relations as the Director of Communications at SortPrice.com. Reach him via email at mediarelations@sortprice.com.