12/08/2020
Facebook Shops are coming, and this is why this is great news!
Facebook made several attempts of entering the world of eCommerce over the past years, but they didn’t see too much success in it, despite all the effort invested. The available solutions were simply not good enough, and the competition stiffened, so the end result was rather slim.
A lot has changed since then, and maybe the most important thing is the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. The popularity of Facebook as a social platform was stagnating for quite a while, but Instagram has gone through a huge and rather rapid expansion. Also, after the acquisition, the opportunity to offer goods on both platforms became real.
The first steps towards this was in the sphere of marketing, when the unified cross platform option became available, and it has shown rather good results.
In the following period, a few things aligned and made Facebook Shops not only potentially great, but almost a necessity.
Namely, after the entire world has been struck by the COVID 19 pandemic, online shopping became even more prominent than before, and the social media platforms were used quite a lot, not only for exchanging information, but also for shopping. It saw a huge increase in revenue for advertisers who used Facebook and Instagram for their advertising campaigns, and this new feature will be able to take them even further down that road.
The situation is similar to the one Google had when they introduced Google Shopping. It saw a huge increase of traffic through that channel, and a huge increase in revenue made by the vendors using it as their key advertising channel.
Given the fact that Facebook and Instagram are under the same organisation, and that they are two major social media platforms, used by a huge majority of the people, it is expected that the results will be the same.
This is a colossal opportunity for smaller vendors and start-ups, as it has been announced that the Facebook Shop will be available free of charge.