If you’re in the e-commerce game, you know that traffic is the lifeblood of your business. Without eyeballs on your products, you don’t make sales, collect email addresses for future sales purposes, or generate repeat business.
So what happens if you can’t get your customers to click away from Facebook into the store you worked so hard to build?
Enter Facebook shops: giving you the best of both worlds!
Right now, Facebook shops are free, and relatively easy to connect to your existing Shopify store. They allow you to showcase your products where your customers are hanging out, increasing your reach and taking advantage of impulse purchases!
Here are some additional reasons to consider connecting your Shopify store to a new Facebook shop:
Synchronization
The two platforms automatically sync so that new products added on Shopify appear on Facebook almost immediately. This makes it easy to ensure that both platforms are showing the products you want them to. You can also choose to include only a subset of your products in your shop if that is a better business decision for you.
Likewise, as stock becomes unavailable, that data is shared across platforms, so you don’t risk a customer purchasing a product that you no longer have for sale.
Automation
If you’re already selling products manually on Facebook, setting up a shop will eliminate the need for one-off special-case requests for products. That frees you up to work on other revenue-generating activities.
Because data is being synchronized, it means that you will more easily manage your inventory numbers between your store, your shop and your in-person point of sale, if it’s connected to Shopify. You’ll always know what your inventory levels are to control restocking or fabrication schedules.
Customization
While it’s easy to let the two platforms show mirrored product information, you aren’t limited to that approach. Instead, you can choose to highlight products that appeal to your Facebook audience within the shop – even if they aren’t prominently displayed in your store. And your Facebook shop doesn’t have to contain every product in your Shopify store. This really lets you target your products to the customer demographics on Facebook.
From within Shopify, you can also choose the specific sales channel you want to make a product visible on, giving you maximum comfort that your products are only appearing where and how you want them to.
Gotchas to watch for
While Facebook shops are a big win for e-commerce businesses, they aren’t completely without quirks! Here are some of the gotchas we’ve discovered while building Facebook shops for our clients:
- Your products can’t violate Facebook’s community standards. That means that individual products may be unpublished for offensive language or content. If that happens, remove the offending products from your shop so as not to bring down the overall quality of the shop.
- Your products can’t be virtual. You can only sell physical products – for a price – rather than give away digital content.
- Product images are cropped to be square in your Facebook shop – you may need to make changes to the images published in your Shopify store to ensure they appear correctly in Facebook.
- Orders may take an hour to appear in your Shopify store. They will still appear in your normal Orders section. If you want to know where an order originated, you can filter to see the source.
Creating a Facebook shop may offer e-commerce businesses a new and lucrative opportunity to get products in front of customers without requiring them to explicitly leave the social media platform.
Obligatory self-promotion
We’re proud Shopify partners, and we love helping our customers maximize the value of their store. If you’re unsure about creating and populating a Facebook shop from your Shopify store, give us a call! We’d love to help you get up and running today.
