Facebook Shops: A New Giant Push Into E-Commerce
Facebook Shops: A New Giant Push Into E-Commerce
By Joshua Pielago, Managing Director - Lokal
Updated 3/2021. We'll continue to update this page as more news about Facebook shops and features roll out.
E-Commerce has grown rapidly in the past couple of years, and even more so due to recent events. In 2019 alone, retail e-commerce sales worldwide reached USD3.53 trillion, with a projection to reach almost twice that or USD6.54 trillion by 2023. This unprecedented growth has caused a multitude of platforms to pop up — but most notable of all is the recently-launched Facebook Shops.
What is Facebook Shops?
Facebook Shops
is a service that aims to provide a seamless online shopping experience by allowing businesses to display and sell products directly from their Facebook page or Instagram profile. Business owners can select products they want featured from their catalog, and even customize the look and feel of their shop with a cover image and matching accent colors to better showcase their brand. Through this endeavour, Facebook intends to connect business owners, regardless of their size or budget, to customers all around the world.
Why should I use Facebook Shops?
With over 2.6 billion active monthly users, Facebook is undeniably one of the best platforms to showcase your business. Not only does it offer low-cost marketing strategies, but it also lets you talk to customers and provide instant support where needed. As opposed to the Marketplace feature launched in 2016, which allows users to sell personal belongings, Shops is primarily aimed at businesses — potentially posing a challenge to commerce rivals such as Shopee, Lazada, or Amazon. After all, with users spending an average of 58 minutes on Facebook and 53 minutes on Instagram
a day, the likelihood of users scrolling past an ad or story that leads to your Shop is higher than that of rival commerce sites.
In any case, adding your business to another platform such as Facebook Shops is bound to result in only good returns. In fact, nearly 1 million businesses are already signed up! But what notable features does Shops have?
Everything we know about Facebook Shops’ features
Facebook Shops is still pretty new — and all we know about it is based on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook live video, which you can see here:
If you don’t want to watch the video, we’ve compiled the list of features in this handy guide explaining we know so far.
Easy Set Up
If you’re already present on Facebook or Instagram and have a catalog of products set up, then Facebook will automatically set up your own Facebook Shop for you without you having to do anything at all. If you’re already on Shopify or other business back-end tools, a few clicks can let you import your inventory and let set up your Facebook Shop quickly. Even if you’re a new business owner who’s just about to create a Facebook or Instagram page, setting up a Facebook Shop is easy at it simply requires cataloging your products and highlighting what you want featured.
Streamlined Shopping Experience
Aside from Shops being easy and free to create, once you’ve set it up on Facebook or Instagram, customers can easily see your stories, featured products, and have the ability to buy them right then and there. Not to mention, Shops will be native and fast — this means you won’t have to go through the trouble of switching to a slow web browser or re-entering your credit card details every time you want to buy something.
E-Commerce Integration
Zuckerberg also announced that they’re partnering with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Channel Advisor, CedCommerce, Tienda Nube, Feedonomics, and Cafe24 to allow small businesses to integrate with a strong and open ecosystem of tools. This will help them manage their customer journey from start to finish, while giving them the freedom to determine how much they want to integrate.
Cross-Platform Consistency
Shops will be accessible from all other Facebook-owned apps: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, and can be shown in stories or highlights and appear in ads
across the platforms. This means that when you set up a Shop, you’ll be able to see it and sell your products directly from both your Instagram and Facebook pages to start. Eventually, Shops also plans to allow customers to buy products directly from messaging apps (Messenger and WhatsApp) as well. When it comes to questions, support, or even tracking deliveries, customers can also message you through WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram Direct.
Dedicated Panels for Shops
The people over at Facebook want you and your business to be seen — and to do this, they’re launching features across their apps that will help people discover small businesses. One notable feature is a dedicated shopping tab on Instagram along with a destination inside the Explore tab to help you find and buy products that might catch your fancy. Zuckerberg also mentions that there may be a Live shopping feature that can let you shop on Live in real-time.
AI and AR Usage
Finally, Facebook plans to include AI and augmented reality (AR) tech in Shops to create a better shopping experience. With AI, Facebook can automatically identify and tag products
throughout your feed to let you easily click-through to purchase things you might like. Additionally, anything you highlight in your online storefront can be “tried on” by customers, such as sunglasses and lipstick or other make up, or even furniture in a room.
In a nutshell
Facebook Shops is still gradually being rolled out in the coming months, and much information is still up in the air. However, the features, the platform, and the potential ease of use provides an exciting new frontier for e-commerce or online shops in the Philippines.
Stay tuned here in Lokal - we'll continuously update this page to provide all the information for Facebook shops.
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LOKAL is a Filipino web design, e-commerce development, marketing and product consulting agency focused on effective campaigns that bring real results to clients. Heavily invested in testing, research, and experimentation, LOKAL - built campaigns bring actual customers to client's physical locations, increases product market penetration, and generate revenues for clients.