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:
- Adding products from e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, OpenCart.
- 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.
