Over the last couple months Facebook has been gradually releasing native shops for your Facebook Page, allowing you to sell things right inside Facebook on your company’s Facebook Page. This feature, at least in theory, should allow companies to sell more because there is less opportunity for turnover in clicking outside Facebook to an unfamiliar website to purchase an item. The jury is still out though on whether these are truly effective, and Facebook seems to only gradually be putting priority into this feature. Here’s how to set it up if it’s available. Be sure to check out my Snapchat via my username jessestay to see a quick video synopsis:
Step 1: Adding Items to Your Store
The first step in setting up your “Shop” section is to verify it is available to you. If the feature is available, without logging in, you’ll see an empty little “Shop” that looks like this:
To start editing your shop, you’ll need to log in as your Page. I usually just click the “Manage Page With Business Manager” option if your Page is being stored inside Business Manager. Otherwise, you are likely already logged in. Once you’re logged in, the Shop section looks like this:
Now you just need to add products to your store. Just click the “Add Products” button and a dialogue that looks like this will pop up:
Just fill out as many products as you want, adding pictures, price information, how many are in inventory (so you don’t oversell), and what shipping methods are available. Now you have a very basic store! When your store is complete it will look like this on your page, as shown on my page, Minecraft For Dummies:
Associating With Stripe:
Once you have your store set up you’ll want to associate your store with Stripe so you can accept payments. To do this, log in as the admin for your Facebook page, and click “see all” in the upper-right of your store. Now in the upper-right select the little drop-down and select “Manage Shop”. This will take you to a page to edit your items, add new items, create collections of items, and more. Now click on the “Shop Settings” tab:
From here you can associate or create a new Stripe account, which will allow you to let people pay by credit card, and allow you to receive payments through your bank account. That’s it! You’re now able to sell products right inside Facebook. But wait – there’s more! You can also advertise your products now to new and existing audiences!
Advertising Your Shop Products to Audiences:
The easiest way to advertise a product from your shop to new audiences is to just click the “Boost” button underneath the item in your shop when you’re logged in as admin for your Facebook Page:
When you click on the Boost button a dialog pops up allowing you to specify specific interest groups and locations where you want to target your product ad. You can also target just to people that like your Facebook Page. Here is what that looks like:
Unfortunately, right now the ONLY way to advertise products inside Facebook (outside your own product catalog on your website) is to boost the post, meaning Facebook optimizes your budget to spend on showing that product to the most number of Facebook viewers in your target audience. It WILL NOT (at least currently) optimize for actual sales of the product. This is disappointing, but where it is still in a test market, I am betting this becomes an option for advertisers in the future.
What is also odd is that Facebook makes you manually enter your products. This will not be an easy option for a major e-commerce retailer, for instance. What would be ideal, and I anticipate for the future, is that Facebook would allow you to import a product catalog from Business Manager, an ads feature that allows you to do cool things with retargeting of visitors of specific products on your website. Imagine this: a customer visits a particular product on your website, and the equivalent Facebook native product (loaded automatically from the same Business Manager Product Catalog) shows up in an ad, allowing that visitor to purchase right inside Facebook.
There are still a lot of features to come, I can tell, but regardless, this process should simplify simple retailers looking to sell a few things right inside Facebook. It also simplifies the purchase process, meaning fewer clicks, more data about customers, and the ability for customers to never need to leave Facebook for the purchase experience. THAT’S POWERFUL!
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