Facebook recently announced a new tool within its apps, Facebook Shops (or Facebook Stores). The idea of the North American company is to offer another channel to businesses where they can sell their products in these difficult times. In turn, it will be a direct competition with other marketplaces such as Amazon.
Thanks to it, merchants will be able to advertise these same products on the company’s social networks among which are Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. It will be possible contact the merchant through WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Instagram Direct to solve the doubts that customers may have. Although at first you can only buy from the store page,later it will be allowed to do it directly from other means, even from a WhatsApp chat.
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What is Facebook Shops and Instagram Shops
One of the main objectives of this new initiative is to ensure that small businesses can sell through the Internet without having to have an e-commerce. This type of online store is sometimes expensive and not all sellers can afford it. But with this Facebook app, everything will be much simpler. Likewise, Mark Zuckerberg himself explained in a videoconference that another of the ideas for which they have created this new utility is to contribute to the development of the economy after the crisis that Covid-19 has brought. Due to this pandemic, online orders have also skyrocketed, so it can help in this regard the sales of any merchant.
With some default templates and other tools you can create an online store within your own fanpage. It will be possible to add your business catalog in just a few minutes to your store, which must be associated with a Business Manageraccount. The Facebook Shops platform can be accessed from a fanpage, from stories or even from ads.
As for Instagram,it will appear in the app’s navigation bar. It will be displayed as a catalog of products and collections of your creators or favorite brands. Meanwhile, Facebook will also debut other functionality. You can tag products in videos, even those that are live. These will appear below the tagged video and viewers of that video will be able to click on it to buy it.
The design of these templates will be fully customizable so that each store can have its identity and adapt it to its branding or corporate image. Within these stores you can create collections adapted to each business, for example, according to sections, types of item, etc. It will become a virtual showcase. In this way, the user experience is much more satisfactory. By being faster and smoother, the sales volume will increase.
How Facebook Stores Work
Facebook stores have been born with the aim of creating a personalized digital showcase, especially for those people who do not yet have an online commerce. This store will allow customers to be inspired so that they can find the products they are looking for and meet their needs. On the Facebook website we can check how they are configured. They are easy to create and very intuitive. In addition, they load faster than a mobile website and have a more global reach.
To set them up, in case sellers already had a store from an Instagram profile or a Facebook page previously, it will automatically become one of these stores. But in order to set up your store from scratch you must first receive an email or notification informing you that you can use Facebook stores. In case any company has a store linked to both their Facebook page and their Instagram profile, they could choose to have a shared showcase on both platforms. This would simplify this process. New sellers can create a store in Commerce Manager.
Within the stores you can create collections to personalize them and thus attract more customers. Through Commerce Manager, the store is personalized, where collections are also created, ordered and personalized. Each collection must have a name, description, and cover media. These will have between 6 and 30 products that can be chosen from all the uploaded. Products can be organized into collections with different themes, for example, to make it easier for customers to find the products they are looking for.
Stores function as a showcase for a brand and your products in the form of a native mobile experience. Once the store is published, customers will be able to find it in the Facebook or Instagram app, on both Android and Apple devices. Your store will be viewed in full screen and collections will be displayed as custom products for your customers.
The stores will provide online merchants with a unified presence on Facebook and Instagram as personalization features are tied together in both apps. Which means that if you have a store accessible from both your Instagram profile and your Facebook page, the collections you have created can be seen in both. In addition, it will also be available on Instagram and Facebook if you have a store from your Facebook page linked to your Instagram profile.
Differences between Facebook Shop and Facebook shopping
The main difference between Facebook Shop and the current way of selling on Facebook is that right now you do not buy directly on the social network. This means that, at the moment, the products that are uploaded to Facebook that we can later tag on the fanpage and on Instagram are external links.
These links take you to an online store where you can make your purchases. But thanks to this new tool you can buy directly while on Facebook or Instagram, and later on WhatsApp. There will be no intermediary to place an order.
At the moment it is already available in the USA. Inthe US, although to see it incorporated into all the social networks of the company Facebook we will have to wait a little longer.
