Last week, Mark Zuckerberg joined Shopify on Facebook Live to unveil Facebook Shop.
Facebook Shop is a new feature that will allow business profiles to set up a native store on Facebook. In short, this means that users can see your listing right within Facebook and complete the purchase without ever having to leave the platform. We were curious how Facebook Shop could fit into a D2C Facebook marketing strategy, so we had to find out more!
Here’s what to look for with the rollout of Facebook Shop:
The Good
- Facebook Shop is simple to use and free to set up. Add in the fact that Facebook is building a dedicated shopping tab for this feature, what’s not to love?
- Your Shop will let you manage your digital storefront across Facebook and Instagram. That means less hair-pulling over curating your digital collections and more time to spend on other things.
- Expect higher conversion rates and/or sales for your small business thanks to the seamless integrations between Instagram and Facebook. For your customers, Facebook Shop will provide a consistent experience no matter what platform they are using to visit your business. A shopper can put an item in their cart on Instagram and checkout on Facebook.
- Leverage native advertising for your products on a lightning-fast platform. Shop photos load almost instantly and buyers can store credit card information for quicker checkout, creating an all-around easier user experience.
- Facebook Shops will use a sophisticated AI system to automate more tedious behind-the-scenes tasks, such as manually annotating product photos with key identifiers. Even more revolutionary, Shops is building out an augmented reality technology that will give customers a digital “try on” experience.
- Enable Live Shopping to interact with your customers in real-time, answer questions, and gauge public responses to your products.
The Bad
- This is not Facebook’s first ride at the online shopping rodeo. This might make some business owners a little nervous about trying out Facebook Shop without a tried and true track record to look back on.
- You can use Shops for free. However, transactions that go through the native checkout do have a selling fee. The fee will likely be 5% to fund the infrastructures that make the native checkout possible.
- Customers will have to go to your Shop on Facebook, which might not be the most effective way to advertise your business. Facebook Shop doesn’t give you the same opportunities to upsell, bundle, or incorporate pop-ups.
- While Facebook Shop is a great resource for brick-and-mortar businesses that haven’t dabbled in eCommerce, it isn’t necessarily the best option for full-time eCommerce shops. Facebook Shop, like Amazon, will get a ton of information about your customers that won’t be passed along to you. Ideally, eCommerce shops should build on their own platform to avoid this transparency issue. At least when you’re on a domain you own with a shop platform subscription you pay for and an email list you keep yourself, if it goes down, you literally know who your customers are.
If you’re new to eCommerce marketing, we recommend setting up Facebook Shop to get started but if you already have a Shopify site that you are sending traffic to you might want to wait on it.
Are you using Facebook Shop? What do you think of the new update? Leave your comments below.