With covid keeping shoppers away from the high street, Facebook became a lifeline for small and medium businesses looking to keep afloat. In response Facebook accelerated the launch of Facebook Shops allowing businesses to directly list their products on the social network.
Launching in Singapore first, with the rest of Southeast Asia at the end of August, this offers another key channel for retailers to recapture lost revenue and survive and thrive online and improve the impact of their Facebook performance marketing.
This also improves discoverability of products, driving more customers to the store, allow for greater personalisation and delivering relevant products to customers and will present product details, allowing customers to make a purchase online.
Where Do Customers Find Facebook Shops?
If you already have a Facebook presence and you are posting, there’s a few ways users can find your Facebook Shop:
A call to action button in your Facebook profile
Instagram Stories
By tagging products in images you post
And in the future - directly in your ads, creating a direct link between your performance marketing and your sales on social.
How Do I Set Up Facebook Shops?
Facebook Shops is powered by the Facebook Product Catalog, but unlike the version that powers Dynamic Ads merchants require an Enhanced Product Catalog.
This is very similar to the existing catalog, except it requires a lot more data fields in order to make sure that clothing is shown to the right genders and so on, and that customers themselves can discover a broad range of relevant products through searching and Facebook’s recommendations.
These additional fields are category specific - for example clothing will need size, gender, age group and others. In the future performance related fields will be included - i.e. promotions, reviews and recommendations.
To onboard these enhanced fields businesses will need to find a partner in order to pass their product feed from their source of truth (for example, a webstore like Shopify, or an ERP system) to Facebook’s API. For help and recommendations, contact us for more information.