After burgeoning its social networking platform and connecting billions of individuals online, Facebook is now introducing features to make it simple for businesses(or brands) to promote and sell its products on the platform. With regard to the same, it is rolling out two new sections — ‘Shop’ and ‘Services’.
The two new sections are Facebook’s effort to make the pages section more useful for the over 60 million businesses on the platform. The new sections are currently being made available in high growth and emerging markets, including the likes of Thailand, Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, India, Argentina, and Taiwan. The e-commerce hub will be rolled out to other brand pages and professional service providers in the coming months.
Commenting on the roll-out of the feature, Ryan Ebanks, Product Marketing Manager, Facebook adds,
The shops and services sections are a continuation of our efforts to make Facebook Pages the most valuable online presence for the more than 60 million businesses around the world that use Pages each month.
Now, let’s take a brief look at the services these e-commerce shops have to offer to consumers like us.
Under the shop section, businesses will have the option to display the details of the catalog of products they are selling on their page. These products are then searchable and can easily be discovered by users like us. Once a customer sees a product he’s interested in buying, he/she can drop in a message to the seller and inquire about the details of the same.
The ‘Service’ section, however, is currently available for all professional services pages, such as plumbing companies and spas. These brands can list the services they offer and how much would it cost you, on their pages. You can then message them to describe you needs and book the services.
With the introduction of these e-commerce features, Facebook aims to give these businesses in the emerging markets a chance to pay for advertising space, thus subsequently adding more ad revenue into the company’s pockets. Benji Shomair, product marketing director, Facebook Pages, told Reuters,
If a business is seeing value from their page, there is a higher opportunity that they could be an advertiser.
These features uplift the importance of the businesses, who now have the option to leverage the power of social network and its billions of users by placing their products front and center in the new page layout. This also brings into play another core entity of Facebook — Messenger. Brands can now also connect bots to dispense more details on product inquiries and offers to first-time as well as returning users. Users will atleast be intrigued to try out this new feature and start a conversation with the brand manager and who knows — this conversation might lead to a successful sale after all.
