Stripe Founders – John Collison and Patrick Colliso

There is currently no easy way to buy products you see on Facebook. Whether it is something a friend shared or an ad from a company you follow, buying anything is a multi-step process that requires clicking through to a new webpage, creating or logging into an account, entering payment information, and so on.

For John Collison, president of electronic payment startup Stripe, the question is not if Facebook will embrace e-commerce, but rather when.

According to Collison, the problem facing product marketing on social media is the annoyance customers go through to actually buy the product. Speaking at Web Summit 2014 in Dublin, Ireland, Collison said:

More people will do this if you make it easier. Given that people are spending so much time on [social network] platforms, it’s natural to make it easy for merchants to sell.

If Facebook does get into the e-commerce game, it wouldn’t be the first foray for the company into the world of electronic money. The company tested the waters for e-commerce with the ill-fated Facebook Gifts, which for a short time allowed people to buy physical gifts to send to friends, and the much maligned Facebook Credits, which were used for micro-transactions in games on Facebook. Both of these were ultimately not very successful.

Earlier this year, Twitter started experimenting with a buy button that allowed users to access a product page straight from a tweet, which would then let them enter shipping and payment information to make the purchase. Twitter’s blog post about the buy button said: “This is an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun.”

Facebook has had its fair share of privacy concerns over the years, so it is difficult to say if people would feel comfortable sharing their credit card information with the social media giant.

There has been no shortage of companies capitalizing on the social media boom, and there are estimates that as many as 30 million small businesses have pages on Facebook. If Facebook does embrace e-commerce, there are plenty of companies who stand to benefit.