Back in May, Facebook announced their new feature, Facebook Shops. While Facebook already had its Marketplace, and Instagram allowed users to buy products featured in posts and ads, this new tool allows businesses to take things further. Businesses and brands are able to create a full-fledged shop on their Facebook Page which links to their Instagram account as well.
In the US, Facebook has also allowed businesses to allow ‘checking out’ in the app so that users don’t have to leave the app. While that feature is available in the US only, there are businesses globally taking advantage of Facebook Shop.
This move was a great initiative by Facebook especially given that it would help support a lot of small businesses during lockdown. Having said that, all your high street brands seem to have created their ‘Shops’ online as well so it could be debated whether smaller businesses have actually gained an advantage or not.
Facebook does have plans on working on this feature and developing it further as they believe the future is online however, I would question whether a lot of people would want to shop on social media and if so for how long?
I think now that lockdown is lifting in a lot of places, online shopping may drop as people would want to visit stores. That’s what I’ve seen with one of my clients at the moment, their online sales have slowed down in the UK as the high streets have opened up.
Having said that, I do think it’s important for businesses who do sell online to have a Facebook Shop as it’s a good way to generate traffic back to the main site. My suggestion here would be to display a limited number of items so that you push viewers to come to your main site where you can gain a lot more data on what they view and give them the opportunity to sign up for your marketing emails.
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