In what could quite possibly be one of the biggest updates Facebook has ever brought to Pages, Buzzfeed reports that the social networking giant has started testing a new feature called “shops”, through which users can buy stuff directly from the Business Page, without being re-directed to a different website.
As a part of this new “shops” feature, a ‘buy button’ is integrated in Facebook Pages. Facebook has been testing the buy button feature in newsfeed for more than a year and it appears that the company is now ready to take it a step forward.
This new feature will transform the Facebook Pages for Shops in a destination from where users can browse products as well as purchase them from the Page itself without leaving Facebook.
Facebook has been introducing new features at regular intervals. With adding features such as business hours, OpenTable integration and peer-to-peer payment capabilities, it is clear that the company is planning to enhance user experience of Facebook Pages.
If the new Facebook Pages do manage get enough traffic and appreciation from users, then they could well compete against the likes of Yelp and Foursquare where business listing acts as a landing page for the users to get more information about the business.
It is not yet clear when the ‘shops’ feature will roll out. It is still in the testing phase. The company has a few partners with whom it is working but has not revealed who its launch partners will be.
As per Facebook’s spokesperson, the company is planning to expand its test further by adding several other partners but as of now, it is very small.
The company’s move towards surging eCommerce makes sense. Currently, most of Facebook’s revenue comes from digital advertisements. The digital advertising market is predicted to reach $60 billion in 2015 while on the other hand, the eCommerce market is estimated to reach $350 billion in 2015. Numbers do the thing.
UPDATE :
We’ve received an official statement from Facebook’s Head of ads product marketing for commerce Ema Rogers. Here it goes :
We continually invest in making Facebook Pages a valuable presence for businesses and useful resource for people, and are at the early stages of testing a new Shop section on Pages that allows businesses to visually showcase their products.
So it may not be the buy button we all had speculated, instead Facebook is testing a way to allow shop owners to visually showcase their products on their business pages. This is gonna be a wait and watch game.
IMAGE : BUZZFEED
