Facebook’s “Shop” Feature Breaks The Wall Between Social Media And Ecommerce
Facebook has recently launched an option of “Shops” on its social networking platform. This Will allow its 2.6 billion users an opportunity to shop while browsing through their favorite social networking website.
As the demand for the e-commerce market rises, Facebook sees this as an opportunity and is ready to cash more money. Facebook “Shops” will provide room to merchants, SMB, and product companies to build a virtual store on Facebook. Facebook is calling it “Social commerce”.
“We want to give people a place to experience the joy of shopping versus the chore of buying. And we want to help small businesses adapt and make it easier for people to discover and shop for things they love,” Facebook said in a press release.
To make things easy and secure, the products that will appear on Facebook and Instagram as the ad will not be linked to any third-party website or server. Instead, it will be linked to a zippy on the Facebook portal which will take the user to a catalogue from where the user can choose or purchase the product. It will also show the saved card details if the user has ever purchased from Facebook or any of its applications.
Image credit- Facebook.
Live shopping experience:
Facebook will also provide live shopping features on its platform. According to Facebook, People have always been showcasing their products in live videos. Now, they can link these products with their store. The products will appear on the bottom of their live feed. By tapping on the product on their screen users can get all the details of the product. Live shopping feature will be available worldwide to its users!
Image credit – Facebook.
Image Credit – Facebook
“Shops” will be an integral part of the Facebook family. Users can save products in their cart on Facebook, and complete the checkout process on Instagram, or vice-versa. Facebook aims to target small vendors for his aspirations, and nearly 1 million users have registered to be a part of this experiment.
The other principal dissimilarity from past commerce enterprise is that Facebook “required the small businesses to go all-in on our tools,” Zuckerberg said.
The platform is free for everyone and Facebook is partnering with other tech giants to provide services at the back-end.
Image credit – Facebook.
Zuckerberg further stated, “Rather than charge for Shops, we know if it’s valuable they’ll want to bid more for ads.”
One of the key partnership deals is made with “Shopify”, According to Facebook, in just a few clicks you can operate a Facebook shops account from Shopify.
Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lutke said, “It’s an incredible new reality in the retail space to have these tools natively in the Facebook platform,” he further mentioned, for small businesses it’s very crucial to find new customers.
CEO Tobi Lutke added, “Communications is incredibly important, for so long that’s been monopolized by large CPG brands on television.”
According to him instead of going to different levels of media and advertisement, sellers will be able to reach directly to the customer. “The DTC industry, as some people call it, really happened on top of Facebook and Shopify.”
With Facebook focusing more on small scale businesses adding Shopify having the strength of entrepreneurs, the model looks like a rival of Etsy and doesn’t seem to target retail chains like Target.
Image credit – Facebook.
According to the Zukerberg and Lutke analysis, this model will help to empower small-scale businesses. Helping those sellers who are genuine, and want to provide efficient services to their customers. The model will help small businesses to highlight their product in the market without expensive advertising. As most of the small scale businesses can’t afford the luxury of advertisement.
Image credit -Facebook
The users will also be able to earn rewards for their purchase. Rewards will be known as loyalty points. Facebook will motivate the sellers to provide these points to the customer on their purchase. This will help them to lure more customers. Users will be able to easily keep track of their loyalty points.
