Facebook Shops: A New Giant Push Into E-Commerce

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. 

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?

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.

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.

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.