Facebook Shops: The Brand New Way of Selling
Facebook has long been an excellent platform for making friends, growing networks, building brands, etc. But have you ever thought, how it would be like selling products on Facebook? If you haven’t, Facebook sure did.
Facebook Shops is a new feature introduced by Facebook that lets you set up a store on Facebook or connect your existing eCommerce store with Facebook. It allows you to turn your Facebook business page into an eCommerce platform where you can easily display your products, promote them, and sell them across your Facebook network.
Benefits of Having a Facebook Shop
Setting up a Facebook shop has many benefits. Let’s explore them one by one.
Easy to promote
It becomes easy to promote your products when they are sold at the place where your customers are spending hours browsing and chatting. Your products will have increased visibility and attention which makes selling products far easier.
Easy design/customization options
The shop setup is easy and comes with many customization options including visuals, brand elements, custom colors, layout options, etc. You can customize your collections with the products you want to showcase and give your store the look and feel that reflect your brand ideal.
Connect with your customers instantly
It allows your customers to quickly reach out to you through Messenger and WhatsApp (to be implemented soon), where you can listen to their queries, get support, track deliveries, and more.
Easier and flexible Checkout
Provide a quick and easy purchase experience for your customers by letting them make payments without having to leave the Facebook app. You can also redirect customers to your online store for checkout. Choose whatever seems perfect for your business.
Insight-driven
View insights and statistics from your shop within your Commerce Manager to see what’s working and what you can improve.
How Does It Work?
To create a Facebook shop you need to have a Facebook business account, a Business Manager account, and a product catalog (a container that holds information about the items you want to advertise or sell across Facebook) that will be connected to your Facebook business account.
If you don’t have an existing catalog, you can create one and connect it to Facebook via your Business Manager Account. You can create catalogs for different types of inventory, like products (e-commerce), hotels, flights, destinations, home listings, or vehicles.
All major eCommerce solutions such as WooCommerce, Shopify, etc., provide you with a way to create and connect your product catalog with Facebook.
Integrating your WooCommerce Store with Facebook Shops
If you are a WooCommerce store owner, creating a Facebook shop and integrating it with WooCommerce becomes easy with the number of plugins available to automate the whole process for you.
It helps you create a product catalog that matches the specifications of the Facebook Product Catalog and sync them with Facebook in the quickest way possible. Product Catalog Sync for Facebook is one of the best plugins to do so.
How Does the Plugin Help Boost Sales of WooCommerce Products on Facebook?
- With the plugin, you can sync your WooCommerce product catalog with Facebook within a few minutes.
- Create your product feeds to perfectly match the specifications of the Facebook Product Catalog.
- Save mapping preferences for future use and edit them whenever needed.
- Filter and exclude products from syncing based on product category, and tags.
- Easily view the product sync log and manage failed syncs (if any) easily.
How to Sync WooCommerce Products with Facebook?
Following are the steps you can follow to Sync your WooCommerce Products with Facebook using the Product Catalog Sync for Facebook plugin.
Step 1- Install and Activate the Plugin
Once you have the plugin installed and activated in your WooCommerce store go to the plugin settings.
The ‘Manage Connection’ window will inform you of the requirements for setting up the store along with relevant links you will need to visit.
Step 2 -Connect to your Facebook Business Account
Having a Facebook business account is a pre-requirement for setting up a Facebook store. If you don’t have one already, create it and log in to it using your credentials.
Step 3 -Exclude Products from Sync (Filter Products)
Before synchronizing the products, you can filter them and exclude non-relevant products(if any) from being synchronized with the Facebook catalog.
Select the Facebook catalog for syncing from the drop-down.
Search and select the product categories you wish to exclude from syncing.
Search and select the product tags you wish to exclude from syncing.
Configure the number of products to be processed in batches. It ranges from 10 to 5000.
Step 4 -Category Mapping
Here you can map the store categories with the Facebook categories. You can save your mapping preferences for future synchronization. It is also possible to edit your preferences whenever you need.
Step 5- Product Syncing
You can start the sync by clicking on Map Facebook categories and Sync button. You can view the progress of sync and its status as shown below.
Following this, you can also cross-check with your Facebook catalogs to see if the products have been updated. In this case, you can see that all the products have been synchronized into the Facebook catalog.
You can also view a detailed log of products that could not be synched, with reasons for failure beside each record from the log section of the plugin. You can use this section for debugging purposes.
To learn about the entire setup procedure you can visit the plugin user guide.
Conclusion
Facebook has provided businesses with the perfect opportunity for growth. If you don’t have your WooCommerce store on Facebook yet, start working on it today and save your business from missing out on a huge share of sales that could make a substantial impact on your store’s growth.
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