Facebook is making it easier for retailers to set up shop on the social network. And Shopify is helping clear the way.
This week the e-commerce company said that it will give all of its 175,000 customers the ability to sell their products from a Shop section on their Facebook Pages in the coming weeks. Those sections, announced last week by Facebook, are meant to give businesses a simple digital storefront, optimized for mobile devices.
The Shop sections are a major improvement from Facebook Store apps, Shopify said in a blog post:
“Existing Facebook Store apps don’t work on mobile devices, which is how most people now use Facebook. As well, existing Facebook Store apps only add a tab to your page, while the new Facebook Shop section appears as a larger section on your main Facebook Page. This means more people will be able to easily discover your products. Finally, the new Shop section includes a subscribe button that lets people get notified when you add new products.”
Merchants can direct customers to their online store or enable purchases directly from Facebook. Shopify will handle the financial transactions and shoppers can save their payment information for future purchases.
Shopify is offering the feature for free for its customers. Once it’s enabled — Shopify said it will be available for all customers in the “coming weeks” — merchants can active it by adding the Facebook sales channel within the Shopify dashboard.
This is just one of many efforts to bring shopping onto social platforms. Facebook and Twitter have each been testing in-feed buy buttons for more than a year, but there has been a recent acceleration in activity on this front. In June, Facebook and Shopify opened Buy button access to a bigger group of U.S. merchants and Pinterest launched Buyable Pins. This week Stripe announced an API to make it easier for businesses to place buy buttons on Twitter and other mobile apps.
The Facebook Shop section is being tested by a few thousand Facebook Pages, most of them Shopify customers. A Facebook spokesman declined to point to any examples of Pages using the feature.
Here’s a demo from Shopify of how it looks:
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