Unlike other social media channels, Facebook has a unique proposition that provides a perfect venue for aspiring sellers. You can sell your products directly through Facebook, similar to your eCommerce website. Meaning, in addition to using organic and paid advertising to drive site-sales, you can instantly sell them on Facebook.

Facebook is a viewer-friendly platform that can be extremely useful in a diverse range of ways, such as passing important updates about the brand, celebrating milestones, sharing job openings, and now, to sell products that you have to sell as well.

With the help of this blog, we aim to take you through various aspects of the Facebook shop, such as, how to set up a Facebook shop and how to start selling your e-commerce goods through Facebook Shop.

What is Facebook Shop?

As you’re aware, for most e-commerce related Facebook advertisements featuring products, when a user clicks on the ad, it will get directed to the corresponding website. In this scenario, there is a high chance for online fraudsters to set up fake websites and Facebook pages, particularly created for collecting sensitive pieces of information such as payment information, contact details, etc. If you don’t want something like that to happen to you, Facebook Shop could be the best place for you.

At present, many e-commerce companies have started using Facebook Shop to drive more sales in conjunction with the efforts that are underway through existing channels.

With the help of Facebook Shop, you can sell your products directly to the customers even by accepting the credit cards with a fair amount of transaction fees through payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, etc.

Selling on Facebook

You can start setting up a Facebook Shop without the need for any prior experience in social media marketing. Another advantage of the Facebook shop is that any individual can easily set up an FB shop when compared to setting up an online shop from scratch.

Here’s what you need to know for setting up the shop.

1. Enable the Facebook Shop Tab

If the Shop tab is not visible on your Facebook page, you will need to add it yourself. In order to do that, you can visit – Page Settings -> Edit Page Info. Select “Templates and tabs” from the Page info. Scrolling down, you can see an “Add a Tab” option.

When you click on “Add a Tab”, you can see a list of options that are available to you. Select the “Shop” option and click on the “Add Tab” near to it. Now you can see the Shop tab open for you on the home page, ready to be customized.

For maximum exposure for your Shop on Facebook, reorganize the tabs by clicking on the tab, and dragging it to the desired position.

2. Setting up the Shop

In order to set up your shop, click on the Shop tab. Mark the agreement on the window that appears right after you click the Shop tab.

• On Set Up Your Shop Section, agree to the Merchant terms & policies & click Continue. You will be then directed to another page called “Select checkout method”.
• Select Checkout Method – In this section, you can choose how you want people to buy the products from your Shop. Available options are: Message to Buy and Check Out on Another Website. Select the appropriate option and click Continue.
• In the next section, you will have to choose the official currency in which you want the transactions to take place. Once the currency is chosen, click the Save button.

An important point to note here is that even if you get the shop ready, it will not be publicly visible, or available for the customers until the products are added to the shop.

3. Define the Shop

One of the most important things when it comes to selling your product is to precisely describe the Shop and the product that you intend to sell. You can do that inside the “Description field”. To make your shop appear genuine and unique, you can add the USP(Unique Selling Propositions) of your product or the services you provide.

4. Adding the Products to the Shop

The complexity comes into play while you are adding your products to the Facebook shop. However, this complexity will be an added benefit to your business. This makes the selling automated & flexible, detailing everything your customers need to know.

What all you need to do while adding products:

• Photos & Videos of the product taken from different angles and under good lighting can be added.

• Subsequently, add the name of your product or your shop, and price. Describe in a few words about your product, and the quality of selling. You can add your company’s website if you have one.
• Make sure that the visibility of your page is “Public”, to gain more audience. Choose the condition of your product (new, used, etc) from the drop-down list in the “Product condition” field.
• In short, every detail of the product, including its size, shape, price, sale price, and color, can be added to the Facebook shop, to provide more clarity to the customers.

‍

• Coming to the shipping options, you can select any mode of shipping. Include the time taken for the delivery of the order, and the shipping cost as well. Be aware that the order should be shipped within three days of booking.
• The final step involves the Return policy, where you have to add the policy statement and give the appropriate period of return. The default return period for Facebook is 30 days, but you have the option to customize it.

Adding products to your shop can also be done by managing the “Catalogue Manager.” You can add products in your catalog connected to your Shop page & hold your currently added products.

“Catalogue Manager” is recommended when you add and manage bulk products, or use inventory across different ads & channels on Facebook & Instagram.

To show you how it’s done, we have added a product to our company’s Facebook shop. Here, the catalog has been automatically updated by Facebook itself.

To add more products to a catalog,

1. Go to Catalogue Manager, and select the catalog with your page on it as shown below.

2. When you get the catalog front view, you can manage your catalog by adding more products you want to sell.

To add the products in your catalog, you can choose one of the three options that are provided. If the number of products is less, you can manually add it. Else, you can go for either “Use bulk upload” or “use a pixel” option, which will update the catalog every time someone visits your shop.

3. If there is no catalog for your shop yet, you can create a catalog by:

Catalogue Manager -> Create a Catalog -> Add your Products. This will be automatically updated in your shop too.

4. Return to your Catalogue Manager when you want to manage your products.

• You can have as many catalogs as you want, but only one catalog can be connected to your shop. You can change the catalog connected to your Page shop if you’re going to switch to a different one.
• After you add the products, select the “Manage your catalog” button on the top-right of the page. This will give access to your connected catalog in Catalog Manager.
• REMEMBER to keep the inventory count for each product up to date in your catalog. If a product’s inventory is zero, it appears as “out of stock” in your Page shop even if its availability is set to “in stock.”

Other than adding the products via the Catalogue Manager, you can also try two different ways.

The few other alternative methods to add products to your shop are:

1. Adding products from e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, OpenCart.
2. Adding products with the catalog batch API.

5. Creating a Collection of Your Products

You know your products and how they fall into different categories. So you can do manual customization to sort your products into categories of price, sales, seasonal collections, size, gender, etc

You can add a collection name, and customize its position on your page.

Congratulations! You’ve now officially launched your own Facebook shop.

6. The Easiest Promotion – Tagging

A smart tip for driving more traffic to your products or sales is tagging your products in the videos or photos you have posted. Just like tagging people in our Facebook feed photos, we can tag or label the products.

Click on the photo you wish to tag, and you will see an option “Tag products” on the right side of the page. Type the product name on the text field, and click on done tagging. When people hover their mouse on the picture of the product, the description, price, and offer available will appear along with it.

7. Why would you use Facebook Shop?

There are ample reasons to use the Shop option on the Facebook page. 59% of the global population uses the internet, and almost 2.6 billion people use Facebook. In that case, providing a “shop” option in an actively used social media platform would increase the seller’s opportunities and a buyer’s choices. Product promotion is also one of the main factors in the Facebook shop, which provides an easy way of marketing for those who have no prior experience in digital marketing.

The only concern with the Facebook shop is that your main website may give finer insights to the whole context of your brand, products, customer reviews, and everything that might highlight your products and services better than your Facebook shop.

So you have to be more careful when choosing the products to business in the Facebook shop so that the purchase value doesn’t decrease.

We recommend you to try out the Facebook shop for once and monitor the purchasing analytics of this platform. If you find it engaging, you’ll get a window of opportunity to take your brand to the next level.

If you want to know which method of Facebook selling is the most effective for your eCommerce business, then chat with us.

‍

The rapid global spread of COVID-19 has been the biggest shock to the lives and livelihoods in nearly a century. Things have become particularly challenging for many businesses and startups as well. The pandemic puts forward an unprecedented outcome from shutting down the factories to the global stock market crash. However, as we’ve no cure found yet, the least we could do is get on embracing the new normality.

One of the critical revolutions that sprouted along digitalization was the scope of sales and marketing in digital space. Digital marketing provides an excellent way to either continue with your business’s functioning or start a new brand, even with less to no prior experience. With society adjusting to the new situations, it is necessary for the brands/businesses to re-strategize their mode of marketing around online platforms to reach more audiences and stand out from the competition.

In this blog, we’ll discuss a few ways to reinvent your marketing strategies:

1. Use social media platforms to connect with your target audiences

Whether you are an established businessman or a budding entrepreneur, opening accounts in all the major online social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram will help you build prior connections with your target audiences. These interactions may not always mean that you get new customers. However, your brand or the services you provide may reach a bigger audience as a result of these.

You can also connect with your regular customers by showing your recent products or any newly added feature via social media platforms.

2. Be Innovative

Traditional marketing methods may not be successful in social media platforms, as there are millions of unique users in these. So plan innovative ways to reach out to the mass by understanding your target audiences’ geographical features and individual preferences. Attract them to your products or services so that your interactions will focus more on the audiences’ needs, which will result in a better chance of getting new customers. For brands, it is a unique opportunity to think outside the box and create innovative ideas that enable them to come forward and make a difference in this digital platform.

3. Rethink Offerings

A rapid change in consumer behavior and market dynamics pose a challenge when it comes to marketing your brand online. Hence, you must prioritize the customer experience now more than ever. As a responsible brand, take your audiences through your services and prove that you are a reliable source. Monitor brand communications all the time, and learn to quickly adapt to the changes required from the audience’s or buyer’s side.

4. Strengthen Your Digital Presence

According to Forbes, internet use has surged by 50-60% during this phase compared to regular times. People are using online platforms more than ever before. Hence, redesigning and enhancing your online presence is an effective way that might attract people to your brand. Engage with your targeted audience by various means such as collaborations, advertisements, and give-aways’/contests.

5. Solve Pertinent Issues

As a brand, you must also focus on reaching out to your existing customers to clear their queries and worries. This starts by informing your customers in a systematic way about how the pandemic will affect the way they avail your services or buy your products. Offer a sense of assurance before they come to you with queries, which will result in a long run customer relationship.

For the sustainable growth of your brand in the digital platform, you should also focus on the technical aspects of digital marketing. This includes monitoring the keyword rankings, increasing organic traffic, and regularly revising the content strategies concerning the situation around. Brands should focus more on the current situation than the general statistics, revenues, and returns, without losing their core service. After all, any brand’s primary responsibility is to provide real value to your customers, with empathy and compassion.

‍

SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of improving the ranking of a website on search engine results pages (SERPs). In an age where everything from relationships to businesses is connecting digitally, the need to stand out and win the race against the competitors is notably high. Considering such a scenario, a brand adopting a digital store can only flourish by organic growth, which can be achieved by applying SEO strategies.

When SEO strategies are precisely applied while designing your website, the chances of ranking increases, resulting in greater visibility among the users and targeted audience. Following the right SEO tactics will tremendously help in the growth of your business/brand. Learn more about the various essential things that you need to get started with SEO from the infographics given below.

‍

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the system of optimizing your website in such a way that it increases the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. The widely used Local SEO optimizes a website to increase traffic, leads, and brand awareness from local search. Study suggests that around 76% of consumers that search for something local on their phone visit a store that day.

However, business owners offering their products/services to more than one country will want their websites and other marketing strategies in all the targeted market locations. Local SEO in such cases will not create much impact. It is best suited to those that are smaller in size who want their main customer base to be within a specific area. Here comes the International SEO for the companies who require to offer their services to the global markets.

What is an International SEO?

International SEO is the process of optimizing the website so the search engine can identify which countries you want to target & which languages you use for business. In short, international SEO is mainly about Geo-targeting. When a user enters their query in the Search engine, Google uses its search algorithms and finds results that match the language and location of the user. Specific signals like multilingual and location-oriented features will let the search engine know that your page has content that answers the user queries. So, by using the International SEO guidelines, your website can gain traffic from multiple regions and multiple languages instead of confining to the limited options.

Keywords are as crucial to International SEO as Local SEO. However, the main difference comes in optimizing the page enough to appeal to different cultures and demographics that you intend to target. Import and Export organizations worldwide, and well-established e-commerce service sites, are a few examples that make use of International SEO guidelines.

How to Implement International SEO?

• Determine What International Content You Will Provide

To implement the SEO guidelines, first, determine whether you want to optimize search results based on language, geo-targeting, or both. For example, Facebook allows users to choose the language of their comfort. Also, travel websites enable users to pick a specific language and narrow their search down to a particular country or a region.

• The URL structure for international websites

This part of geo-targeting focuses on location. Your URL structure helps Google figure out which of your pages to show searchers in different countries. Domains like Country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) are applicable for a specific location.

For example: www.abcd.co.in & www.abcd.co.fr

Top-level domains (TLD) are made use of for targeting specific countries. Most businesses either set up a whole new website for each target country or add a subdirectory structure on their existing website.

For example, Sub-domain: https://fr.abcd.com

To set up a subdirectory structure, create a folder on your website for each target country labeled with that country’s two-letter ISO code.

Sub-directory: https://abcd.com/fr

• Hreflang Tags

HrefLang is for business owners who have a multilingual website. It wants search engines to send people to the content in their language. HrefLang Tags allows cross-reference pages with similar content for different audiences. The information under this signals to search engines that target the audience for the page. Hreflang tags are in the <head> of a website.

Example: <link rel=” alternate” href=”https://www.abcdcom/” hreflang=”en-US” /> (American version)

• The X Default Tag

The X default tag is a default version of the site you can choose to serve people when the language or location tag does not match any of the available ones, and no page is better appropriate. This page will be alike for all users.

• International Link Building

Getting links from foreign markets might be one of the most complex activities in an International SEO project. From different competitive landscapes to cultural and language barriers, international link building will likely require extensive research, more time, and more coordination to achieve success. If your budget and other resources do not allow you to conduct such activities in-house, then go for a manual link building agency for your specific requirements.

• Consider Additional Local Signals

Additional geo-targeting signals can work in your favor. Consider using the following strategies to signal the country or language of your users:

1. Display prices in local currencies.

2. Include location data such as address and phone number for your regional offices.

Optimizing a website for the local audiences concerning their respective countries will benefit your website and reach tremendously. However, it is equally vital to get the localization of website content in the first place. The whole performance of your website matters for the aesthetic appeal or the user experience. Else, the different versions of your website(various locations and languages) may compete against each other for rankings or may not be listed at all. The notable difference between local and international SEO is the language and the impact it has on everything. Language affects culture, the decision-making process, how a user searches for products or services, how people purchase products or services, and why they think the way they do.

Form your International SEO strategy rightly

On the surface, international SEO may seem like an alien concept. However, in reality, it is similar to our local SEO manners. Instead of optimizing a website to attract traffic from your city or state, you’re optimizing it for different countries and languages. In order for your international SEO to succeed, you need to know your target audience and their language inside out.

• Choose your global target and provide content accordingly.
• Establish which languages your page is targeting and show that to search engines using language tags.
• Try not to use cookies or scripts to show different-language versions of the page. Search engines cannot crawl that type of varying content, and users may not be able to see it either.
• Localize all content and branding using the local language, currency, and time zone with contact information like addresses and phone numbers.
• Domain strategy can make a significant difference to your international SEO strategy. Country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) are reserved for a particular country and have an extension of a country code, like www.domainname.fr. These specific extensions make this the ideal structure for geolocation and can be used for targeting the audience based on their location effectively.
• Acquiring International Links- There are link opportunities such as directories for submission, relevant conversations to join in comment threads, and links/resource pages where the link builder reaches out with an email and requests a link. The user engagement and the ranking may be positively triggered if the links provided in your webpage belong to a local resource or in the local language of the audience you target.

The notable difference between local and international SEO is the cultural design and the impact it has on everything. In that case, language affects culture, the decision-making process, how a user searches for products or services, how people purchase products or services, and why they think the way they do.

‍