Skip to main content

Facebook’s new shopping features could boost sales for small businesses

facebook-shopping-feed
Image used with permission by copyright holder
The social network is becoming the shopping network: Facebook is now letting businesses sell items and services directly through their pages at no extra cost.

Facebook’s Shop section for Pages, which lists the items a particular business sells and allows general users to put in an offer for a product via Messenger, is being rolled out to merchants in “high-growth and emerging markets.” The countries set to receive the feature include Thailand, Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, India, Argentina, and Taiwan.

The Services section allows businesses to do exactly the same in regard to the services they provide. This particular function is currently only available to professional services providers, but will receive a general roll-out in the coming weeks, reports VentureBeat. As you can see in the screenshots below, businesses can provide both photos and prices for the goods or services they sell.

Facebook_Services_Section2
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Alongside its integration of bots, these new features mark Facebook’s latest bid to boost business and customer engagement on its platform. The end goal will likely be to stop users from navigating to external websites for retail purposes. Smaller businesses will stand to benefit the most from the new sections, as they counteract the need for a website altogether. Additionally, with both Facebook (for mobile) and Facebook Messenger boasting a billion users each, it could expose businesses to an untapped customer base.

In the past, Facebook only permitted select businesses to sell products by creating paid ads. An estimated 60 million businesses are believed to have a presence on the social network.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has reached out to local businesses. In December, the platform launched a listings tool much to the ire of Yelp. Meanwhile, Instagram (which Facebook owns) has also been stepping up its features for brands and business users.

Editors' Recommendations

Saqib Shah
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Saqib Shah is a Twitter addict and film fan with an obsessive interest in pop culture trends. In his spare time he can be…
Meta’s new AI research may boost translations on Facebook, Instagram
Image with languages displaying in front of a man on his laptop for Meta's 200 languages within a single AI model video.

Facebook's parent company, Meta, announced a new AI model today that can translate hundreds of languages, and its research is expected to help improve language translations on its social media apps, specifically Facebook and Instagram.

On Wednesday, Meta unveiled its new AI model, NLLB-200. NLLB stands for No Language Left Behind, which is a Meta project that endeavors to "develop high-quality machine translation capabilities for most of the world’s languages." The AI model that came from that project, NLLB-200, can translate 200 languages.

Read more
Amazon eying October for another Prime shopping event, reports say
best amazon tech deals 5 25 2017 online tablet shopping

This year’s Prime Day sale starts on July 12, though new reports suggest Amazon is also planning another Prime shopping event for later in the year.

The e-commerce giant has been telling sellers about a “Prime Fall Deal Event,” according to reports from CNBC and Business Insider.

Read more
The new ways Meta will pay you to make content for Facebook and Instagram
facebook hacked

Creators on Facebook and Instagram will soon have more ways to generate revenue from their content.

On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared via a Facebook post (and in a series of comments on that post), a few updates on monetization for creators on Facebook and Instagram. These updates included expansions to existing monetization options, as well as a few new ways to make money.

Read more