In recent months a slew of trendy new websites have popped up, aiming to help consumers with their future shopping needs. No, not with daily deals, but with product and brand discovery. Sites like Fancy, Pinterest, Svpply, and CircleMe, to name a few, are deeply social but don’t try to connect consumers with one another and then try to show brand ads to all of them. Instead these sites offer platforms with which consumers can discover and display the art, books, clothing, brands, and technology they already love.

Over the past several years, Facebook has created a destination that is central to the lives of over 750 million Internet users across the world. This scale, along with its ability to harness the power of individuals’ social connections, has allowed Facebook to usher in the next phase of commerce on the Internet. This next era of the Web will be driven by brands everywhere not only leveraging Facebook’s master social graph to conduct e-commerce but also selling directly to consumers on the platform itself. This is the new era of Facebook commerce or F-commerce.

Not too long ago, shopping used to be a mostly isolated activity, especially online. However, the recent surge of social networks, coupled with the smartphone revolution, is ushering in a new age of consumerism where customer research and real-time purchases are increasingly informed, influenced and socialized by way of social media.

Mobile payment systems enable consumers to use their smartphones, instead of cash or credit cards, to purchase products or services in stores. A number of these systems leverage near-field communication (NFC) chips installed in smartphones, such as Google’s Nexus S and the rumored next-generation iPhone. When consumers touch or wave their NFC-enabled smartphones at devices installed at registers, the NFC chip communicates with the register to process the transaction.