How to create a Facebook store and Market with Facebook Ads

                          

What’s a Facebook store? 

Facebook is the world’s largest social network with more than 2 billion users. Facebook has global coverage. Facebook Store—Facebook’s newest tool for social commerce-make it possible for even the smallest business to reach that huge and growing market. As Mark Zuckerberg put it, “Facebook Store gives [small businesses] the same tools to build and operate your online store that global brands have had for reaching their customers.” With a Facebook Store, your customers can discover, share, and even buy your products without ever leaving the social media platform.

Facebook Stores offer several features to help you easily sell online. For example, with a Store, you can

• create a native shopping experience so your products are discoverable right from your main Business Page;
• customize design elements, like color and font, so your Store matches your brand; and
• set up one Store that appears on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

Why should I open a Facebook Store?

Facebook Store make it easy and cost-effective for even the smallest business to create an attractive online shopping experience for their customers. Here are a few ways a small business can benefit from launching its Store.

You can build a Facebook Store even if you don’t have an online store or use an eCommerce platform.
You can display products, answer customer questions, and collect a payment, all from your Shop.

If you do have an online store and use an eCommerce platform like Shopify, you can sync it with your Shop. That way, updates to inventory, pricing, and so on that you make in Shopify will be automatically reflected in your Facebook Shop.

You reduce friction for your customers.
Shopify identifies a difficult checkout process as a top reason people abandon online shopping carts. Facebook Stores removes that hurdle in two ways.

First, after a shopper has made their first purchase through Checkout, their payment and shipping details auto-fill for any other vendor also using Checkout.

Second, shoppers can float from one app to the next and continue their shopping process. So if your customer sees a product on Instagram and places it in their cart, they can complete the purchase later on Facebook.

People interact with Facebook and Instagram in lots of different ways. Facebook Stores help you catch users’ attention no matter how they use those platforms.

How to set up a store on a Facebook page

Facebook wants to make social commerce accessible to small businesses, so the platform made the job of creating a Store simple. If you already have a Facebook Business Page and products to sell, you can have a Store set up before your espresso gets cold.

Before you start, make sure you:

• comply with Facebook’s commerce policies,
• are a Business manager admin,
• have a Facebook Commerce manager account, and
• are on a laptop or desktop (you can’t set up your Store from a mobile device).

Set up your Facebook Store

Facebook’s Commerce Manager is where you’ll set up and manage your Store.  Navigate to the Commerce manager to start the process.

The first thing you’ll select is where you want customers to complete their purchase:

Next up, you’ll provide information in three categories. Click “Set Up” to start the process:

In the Business Information section, you’ll give your business a name and connect it to your Facebook Manager account. 

Continue to the Inventory and Shipping Preferences section. Here, you’ll create a catalog, set delivery options, and add a return policy.

Finally, you’ll complete the Payouts section. Here, you’ll add your business’s physical and email addresses, add a business category (e.g., clothes, services), including your location and tax information, and link your bank account.

Congrats! Your Store is now set up. It’s time to add products and customize your Store so it perfectly aligns with your brand.

Add products

There are several ways to start building your catalog of products in your new Facebook Store.

If you’re starting fresh, no problem. You can add products to your Store manually, in bulk, or through an API. Just create a catalog to hold your products. Then, add products to it.

If you already had products loaded to an existing Facebook Page store or used Instagram product tags, you don’t need to do anything. Those products will be available for your new Store.

If you have an eCommerce store on a platform like Shopify, you’ll be able to import your products directly to your Facebook Store. You just need to set up the Facebook store channel in Shopify.

Market with Facebook ads

      Opening a Facebook store without advertising is like throwing a party and not sending invitations. You can help your business reach more people where they’re shopping when you create an ad for Marketplace.

Here’s what it means to advertise on Marketplace:

• You’ll use the Ads Manager tool to design and create your ad. You’ll set your budget for your ads.
• Then you’ll select your ad placement. We recommend that you choose Automatic placements for your ad, which allows it to appear on Marketplace, if it’s compatible with your settings, and all other compatible placements on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network.
• People can see your ad when they use the Facebook app on their phones to shop on Marketplace. Your ad appears with other relevant products and services on the Marketplace, so customers interested in your business can click on your website, or app or view details in the marketplace for more information.

You can choose from these ad objectives when you create your ad for Marketplace:

• Brand Awareness
• Reach
• Traffic
• Video Views
• Lead Generation
• Event Responses
• Messages
• Conversions
• Catalog Sales
• Store Traffic

     With Facebook ads, you can tailor your promotions to a specific audience based on gender, age, Location, job, interests, and any demographical or behavioral data.

Advantages and disadvantages of a virtual Facebook store

Having a(nother) online store on Facebook sounds good, doesn’t it? But is it profitable to sell your products among viral videos about cats, songs, and photos of family members? Let’s start weighing it all out.

Advantages

• Every potential client, or almost all of them, are on Facebook—and we want to be where clients are, don’t we?
• It is free: this is always a plus J.
• It is easy to set up: it will be ready after a few clicks.
• Shareable: once you have created your products and offers, it is very easy to share them as if they were normal posts.
• Marketplace: have you seen the new tab on the App? They started by selling second-hand products, but we think that they intend to create a real marketplace. They are already begun adding some new products.
• Tagging your products: this is perhaps what we like the most—whenever you publish a picture where one of your products appears, you will be able to tag them so users can click on them.

Disadvantages

• It takes time: although it is easy to set up if you use a native tool you will need to spend some time updating prices and images. Watch out—it is better not to have it than to have it without any updates.
• Little visibility: unless you share and change your products a lot, at least for the moment, only a few people know about f-commerces.
• The payment is made on your website: e-commerces in the USA using Stripe or PayPal can already complete the purchase without leaving Facebook, but it is still not possible in Europe.