How To Sell On Facebook Shop

How to use Facebook Shop to make sales

When it comes to business expansion, you want to make sure that you are working with a trusted marketplace to facilitate the best possible sales and grow your interactions with customers to a profitable margin.

With that being said, Facebook is an excellent way to do this, and using a Facebook shop is perhaps one of the most effective ways to create a dedicated page for your business, and at the same time, allow a personalised shopping experience for customers.

What is Facebook Shopping?

Wait a minute. What on earth is a Facebook shop? Facebook doesn’t have a shop, do they? Ah, but that is where you are wrong.

The Facebook shop is a shopping experience introduced on the mobile in 2020. It was created by Facebook in May, and allows businesses, regardless of their size, to create a virtual store that they can sell across all of the Facebook surfaces, like for example Facebook marketplace and Instagram shopping.

In Facebook shops, you are allowed to use WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or Instagram Direct to communicate with customers, whether that is to answer questions, or offer support.

You may have encountered this before under the more generic term of Facebook shopping. This is what people refer to when they are shopping online using Facebook. By using Facebook Marketplace, Facebook shops, and Facebook page shops, Facebook has become a virtual shopping centre. Sellers can now communicate on a global basis with potential buyers.

Why Facebook?

Of course, you may be curious as to why people are using Facebook of all places to sell their products. The reason for this is because Facebook is one of the best online platforms in the world, having a massive presence in terms of social media and the total number of users.

Personal feelings about Mark Zuckerberg aside, Facebook has more than 80 million different business pages, with both small and medium-size businesses having a presence, as well as the big giants. The typical average user on Facebook spends about an hour a day looking through their feed, and at least 7 out of 10 American customers have found products exclusively through Facebook they have then gone on to buy.

It is estimated that over 1.7 billion people use Facebook every day. Facebook has become the dominant social media platform in the world, with up to 60% of all people on the Internet using the platform. It’s estimated that there are over 500,000 new users every day, and this also means that 96% of all active on Facebook are using the app.

Are Facebook Shops, Page Shops and Marketplaces all the same thing?

You may be slightly confused as to whether in multiple different channels in play here. Facebook shops, page shops, and market places may be confusing to anybody who is not accustomed to Facebook and its processes. Fundamentally, there is a difference between them, and it is crucial to understand the difference for success.

Facebook shops are storefronts operating online. This is where shoppers go and find products and brands; they make a purchase after they have found them, and they don’t even have to leave the app. Businesses can set up online stores very quickly, and they can be accessed by both Facebook and Instagram uses.
Facebook‘s page shops are the shops that offer services to the customer that are offsite. So for example, if you wanted to link your website to the customers, you would use a page shop. There will be ways to channel people towards your website.

Finally, you have the Facebook marketplace. This is an area where people can freely buy, sell and trade items, without having to use official Facebook channels. By filtering results using price, location, and the type of category that they are searching in, the marketplace is an easy way for people to get products. If you’ve ever bought something off Facebook and then gone to collect it from someone in your town, you used the marketplace.

Why sell on Facebook Shops?

You may well be wondering why you should bother selling on Facebook shops at all, but there are multiple reasons why it is a good idea to do so. There are numerous features of the Facebook shop which are exclusive to it at the moment.

Here is a list of them:

Business connections. The Facebook shops program allows you to surface your products across different networks or connect to Facebook. So you can put them on the marketplace, you can put them on Instagram, and they all have the same checkout system.
Mobile shopping. With a growing majority of people using the smartphone as a way to navigate across the Internet, Facebook shopping provides you with an ability to tap into a fully immersive mobile experience. By playing to the dominant form of shopping at the moment, you are allowing yourself more sales.
Easy checkouts. It has never been easier for a seller to put the products that they have onto the shops and then allow customers to freely explore, buy, and then check out their products without any issues.
Personalised shopping encounters. Thanks to the power of the personalised shopping experience, you get a chance to give customised content based on the searches and clicks of the customer.
Driving sales. The beautiful thing about Facebook shops is that you can use them to get in touch with customers quickly thanks to the power of Instagram Direct, Messenger and eventually WhatsApp. You can ask questions, track the deliveries and get the support you need.
Extra goodies. When you can get access to product discovery, promotions, tagging products before going live and other cool extras, you help to create the right environment for sales to flourish.

What do I need to start?

So, what is it that you need in order to start selling on Facebook? Well, you do need to make sure that you have a specific handful of things.

Obviously, you’re going to need to make sure that you have an existing Facebook account. Furthermore, you will need to make sure that you have a business page on Facebook, as well as a minimum of 2000 likes on the Facebook page that you intend to start turning into a shop. You have to make sure that you sell physical products, you cannot have any digital options, and you have to comply with the terms laid down by Facebook.

Your business also needs to be registered in the country you’re selling from, and you have to have a valid bank account which is directly connected to your name, as well as the country that your business is listed in, in addition to a tax identification number.

The fees

Like any type of business opportunity, there are fees which you will need to think about before getting started. If you’re selling on Facebook, you might be liable to pay a 5% fee per transaction, and a selling fee of $0.40. There is also a fee for chargebacks which sits at $20.

Thankfully, if you want to, you can sell on Facebook using any of the processes that are mentioned below.

You can create a Facebook shop using Commerce Manager, create your Facebook shop through an e-commerce platform, or surface your products on the Facebook marketplace using the listing partners provided by Facebook.

If you want to know how to create a Facebook shop through Commerce Manager, or how to make a Facebook shop through Marketplace connectors, then just give us a shout. We’d be happy to help you out.

The best practices for selling on Facebook

When it comes to selling via Facebook, there are a couple of things that you should bear in mind.

It is vital to make sure that your shop is vibrant and easy to work with, offering an inspiring set of images which detail what products you offer. These products need descriptions for the best results.

You should also make sure that your products have accurate descriptions, and the ship itself has to represent the business you own – your branding needs to be consistent. Make sure that your inventory is up to date with no issues, and you’ll see the best results if you showcase what you’ve got in the form of different collections.

Changing your shop design to match festivals and special occasions will help you to stay up to date and relevant. It means that the offers you provide are topical and relevant.

Facebook seller FAQ

Q: How does a seller promote products to customers and their audience?

Well, you can promote your Facebook shop products in two ways. First of all, you can publish a post about it on your timeline, or second of all, and you can use Facebook Ads to make sure that the product gets a better reach.

Q: How many days does a seller have to ship the products that have been purchased by customers?

If you’re selling via Facebook, then you have three business days to ship the product. This three day period begins from when you receive the order. From the day you receive the order, the customer must get it within ten business days.

Q: I want to adjust the visibility of my shop to match my target audience. How can I do this?

Adjusting the visibility of your shop is not difficult. Facebook automatically sets the visibility of your product to the country that you belong to. If you want to set a target audience, then you need to follow these steps.

Settings > Page Visibility > Edit

Q: Are there items that I can’t sell on Facebook?

Yes, there are a lot of different items that you can not sell on Facebook. These are illegal, prescription or recreational drugs, tobacco and supplementary resources, explosives, weapons and ammunition, pets or animals, sexual promotional products, alcoholic beverages, and healthcare products.

Facebook Marketplace – the king of platforms?

When it comes to these services, a lot of people are interested to see if Facebook Marketplace has the potential to outpace the likes of eBay and Amazon.

Theoretically, yes. Facebook ticks a lot of the boxes for becoming one of the dominant platforms, if not the best – it has a massive user base and combines social media with e-commerce.

However, what makes Facebook not quite a powerhouse yet is the fact that it has only been in the e-commerce business for a short period – giants like eBay and Amazon have been doing this for decades now.

With that being said, it may only be a matter of time for Facebook to rise to the top unless the other platforms offer up some kind of competing element, probably in regard to the social media aspect of things.

Final thoughts

It’s not difficult to see that Facebook has the potential to be the future of e-commerce. There are many reasons why this site could be useful, and those sellers who want to see success may well find that establishing a presence now is a good idea.

Social media, paired together with e-commerce, means that there are two of the critical success points for a business in the same place. On the one hand, you’ve got the unmatched power of social media for influencing purchasing trends, coupled with the easy access of e-commerce right there on the same website, or at the very least, just a few clicks away from the site a business has.

We’ll definitely be interested in seeing exactly what something like this can offer, and we’re very excited to see what kind of services we can improve and introduce as time goes on. If you need help getting started with Facebook shopping at the moment, please give us a shout, we’re happy to work with you.

Talk to us about Facebook Shops.

Call us FREE from mobiles and landlines on 0800 044 3664 and speak with one of our Facebook experts to request more information or schedule a meeting.

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