No matter how central Shopify is to your brand’s ecommerce presence, you’ll probably be mindful of the potentially greatly lucrative audience that your Facebook follower base also represents. After all, we’re talking here about the world’s biggest social network that – as of the first quarter of this year – commanded more than 2.6 billion monthly active users.
Even as Shopify Plus partners ourselves, we can therefore understand if you’re yearning to better capture online sales from some of those Facebook users who have an affinity with your brand.
You might therefore have very good reason to take an interest in one of the social giant’s latest high-profile launches: Facebook Shops.
What is Facebook Shops?
In the words of Facebook itself in its announcement of Facebook Shops in May: “For years, people have used our apps to buy and sell things from the early days of posting a photo of a bicycle with the caption ‘for sale’, to selling your coffee table on Marketplace”.
Facebook Shops, though, has been more specifically conceived in light of the disruption brought by the coronavirus pandemic, as a means of allowing brands large and small to easily showcase their products via Facebook and Instagram.
That doesn’t sound very new, you might think – but Facebook Shops actually represents the next big step towards a thoroughly native shopping experience.
Those who launch a Facebook Shop can easily customise its colours and layout, for example, in addition to bringing together goods from their store’s inventory to form custom collections to better engage their followers.
Combining the best of Facebook and Shopify
Much of the appeal of Facebook Shops lies in how it empowers brands that have a presence on the social platform, but whose brick-and-mortar premises may still be closed or restricted in their operations, to draw upon Facebook’s familiar functionality to sell more easily online.
That means being able to connect with customers much as if they were wandering around their high-street shop, albeit through Facebook communication tools like Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram Direct.
Of particular interest to the Underwaterpistol team given our own work as Shopify Plus partners, though, is how Facebook Shops’ emergence demonstrates the continuing developing relationship between Shopify and Facebook.
The two have been working together since 2015 to boost the standard of multi-channel ecommerce solutions that merchants have at their disposal. So, it’s logical for them to join forces again for Facebook Shops, with Shopify presenting it to its existing sellers as an additional sales channel.
Just imagine being able to create a truly customised, branded ecommerce presence on both Facebook and Instagram, with product collections able to be curated directly inside these networks.
Especially convenient and wonderful, though, is that Shopify’s integration with Facebook Shops means your inventory and items will remain the same across your ecommerce store and Facebook shop.
You can therefore keep on managing your business from one place, while providing your target customers with a channel additional to your main Shopify store that just happens to be on the most popular social network on the planet. That sounds to us like a heavyweight enhancement to any brand’s online sales armoury.
It’s early days, so now’s the time to explore its potential
Hopefully, by the time you read this, Facebook Shops will have rolled out to your brand – but even if it hasn’t, you can still get ready by adding a Facebook channel on Shopify.
Then, there’s the conversation that you can have with our team here at Underwaterpistol, on how we could assist you in unlocking the potential of this new, exciting and COVID-secure shopping channel – potentially a key plank of your brand’s omnichannel strategy in the 2020s.
Simply send us an email or call us on +44 (0)20 3701 6789 for further information.
