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Last April, Gamestop Corp. (GME) opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered. Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap Inc., J.C. Penney (JCP) Co. and Nordstrom (JWN) Inc. have all opened and closed storefronts on Facebook Inc.’s (FB) social networking site.

“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Sheetz said in a telephone interview. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”

“It was basically just another place to shop for all the stuff already available on the retailer websites,” Gerten said. “I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F.’”

37% of Facebook store operators were using the site as their sole sales channel.

No matter the size of the business, consumers still express hesitation when it comes to making purchases on social networks. According to JWT Intelligence, privacy was shoppers’ main concern when asked about F-commerce in June 2011. Similar percentages of consumers questioned whether Facebook was secure enough to be a safe purchase platform.

small businesses find the channel appealing because it lets them “leverage their scrappiness,”