The Facebook Shops feature enables businesses and traders to both display and market, and ultimately sell, products and services on Facebook.
Appearing as a virtual storefront, users can visit the Facebook shop of a business or profile and make direct purchases without leaving Facebook – thereby streamlining their customer experience and giving you more flexibility regarding how you sell and engage with your customers.
This feature is directly linked with Meta’s Commerce Manager, which uses a backend dashboard to give business owners full control over their inventory, pricing, and more besides.
Suffice to say, a Facebook Shop cuts out the middleman and lets customers move from the discovery phase on social media right through to a direct purchase – without leaving the app. Here’s how to get started…
What Do You Need to Create a Facebook Shop?
For starters, to create a Facebook Shop you need to manage a Facebook business page. Without a business page, you cannot create a storefront – so this is a must-do if you haven’t yet built your business presence on Facebook.
Once you’ve got your page ready, you need to navigate to the Shops page on Meta Business – select ‘Get Started’ and then ‘Create a Shop’.
The next stage of the process will be made easier if you already sell on Shopify or another platform, as you can simply connect your online touchpoints. If you don’t, it’s no problem – you simply need to select ‘I Don’t Use These Platforms’ and continue the set-up journey.
The Shop builder will ask you to select the page that you want to sell from and will then either ask you to select a catalogue of products that you already showcase on your page or will leave a space for you to add products later.
When you’ve finished setting up the shop, you need to head into the Commerce Manager to manage your catalogue and add, edit, or remove products from your shop.
What Makes a Good Facebook Shop?
Setting up a Facebook shop is incredibly easy – so much so that there are tons of businesses out there doing it. But how do you make your shop stand out for all the right reasons?
- Use Collections to group products and items together into a more cohesive experience for customers
- Add promotion banners to your shop homepage to entice customers
- Share your shop in relevant groups and on relevant local pages / pages that link with your industry or market
- Ensure that pricing and all marketing collateral is consistent across this and other online touchpoints
The more you do to customise your Facebook Shop and connect it with the experience that you want customers to enjoy on your website, other online platforms, and by interacting with you directly, the better. Facebook Shops may be a feature that’s built on convenience, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t also be geared towards continuing the customer experience and ensuring that all your touchpoints work in harmony together.
We hope this not only helps you with the initial set up but also inspires you to use Facebook Shops as a convenient and user friendly touchpoint for social driven customers. Happy creating!
