Publishing your shop across various commerce platforms allows you to expand your reach, generate more sales, and increase revenue. eBay, Amazon, Etsy, and now Facebook too – all of these are platforms where you can publish products and look for new customers. What makes social commerce (e-commerce on social platforms) such a huge success is the fact that users are already on these platforms spending time, so the ability to shop is just a complementary service that social networks provide to their billions of users. In this guide, we will go over the steps to open a Facebook shop, but first, it’s important to understand how to do it and why you even need a Facebook shop.
How to sell on Facebook and why you should do it
In a world with countless commerce platforms and eCommerce stores, it’s hard to keep up if you’re not where your customers spend the most time, and Facebook is one of those places. Facebook users spend an average of over 40 minutes a day on the popular social network, which is quite a lot of time considering it’s a daily average. Therefore, it’s time to leverage Facebook as a sales platform. Facebook may not offer as many commerce features as WordPress or Shopify, but it already has all the essential components to sell your products. What makes Facebook a special place to sell products is that you don’t need an existing online store to connect to Facebook Shop, and you can do it directly through your Facebook page. Additional benefits of opening a Facebook shop:
- You can add an unlimited number of products.
- Products can be organized into collections and categories.
- Customer service is handled directly through the page itself.
- Get Insights and statistics regarding sales, visits, and more.
- Your products will appear on Marketplace, significantly increasing your exposure.
Just the last advantage on this list is reason enough to open a Facebook shop now.
How to set up a Facebook shop?
Before we begin the tutorial and go over the steps to set up a shop on Facebook, let’s review what you need in order to have the ability to open such a shop. First, you need to have a Facebook account and a Facebook business page, which are the 2 most basic requirements to start selling on the platform. Next, your Facebook page will need to meet the following requirements: selling physical products only (currently, you cannot sell digital products in a Facebook shop) and having agreed to Facebook’s Merchant Terms. If you sell in the United States, you will be required to connect an American bank account and your tax identification number. If you are sure you meet all the requirements, you can set up your Facebook shop:
Quick navigation to the steps for setting up a Facebook shop:
1. Set up your shop page
The first step is to turn your Facebook page into a shop page. You need to be logged into the business page with admin permissions to perform this action. On many Facebook pages, the Shop option is already enabled by default; users cannot see it until you use it, but you can. To start, click on the word Shop on the left side of your business page menu. If you can’t find it in the menu, click on More and then on Shop.
Can't find the Shop tab?
If you cannot find the Shop tab in the menu or by clicking on More on the main page, it means you haven’t enabled the page template designed for an eCommerce store. Therefore, you need to click on Settings and then on Templates and Tabs, where you can switch to the template suitable for eCommerce, which will immediately activate shop settings on your business page.
2. Configure the shop details
Clicking on the Shop tab will lead you to a popup window explaining the process you are about to go through. Click on Go to Commerce Manager to start the process.
After navigating to Facebook Commerce Manager, you will arrive at a page explaining the benefits of opening a shop on social media through social media management and giving you the options to open a Facebook shop and an Instagram shop. In addition, on the side you will see an option to quickly connect Shopify or create a test shop with an API. Click Next to proceed.
Next, you will be given the option to decide how you would like to receive payments – via an external website connected to the shop or via Facebook’s In-House checkout (currently available for the US only, leaving us with the first option). Click Next to proceed.
After choosing (for lack of a better choice) a checkout method via an external website, Facebook asks you where you would like to manage your shop from. In other words, on which Facebook page you manage or own would you like to set up the shop? For demonstration purposes, I used an old Facebook page called Al Quran Full Book NFT.
After selecting the page, choose the country where your customers are located and where you want to ship goods after receiving orders. I chose Israel. After selecting the country you sell to, click Next.
Review the details you configured to make sure everything is in order, submit your shop for review, and click on Finish Setup.
Now, Facebook will want to approve the shop in order to add it to its database of active shops, and you won’t be able to publish it until it is approved. This action can take a few business days, but usually, there is a quick response. You can always contact a Facebook representative to get a faster response.
3. Add products to the Facebook shop
After setting up a Facebook shop properly, you will reach the main shop screen, also known as the Facebook Commerce Manager. On the shop’s main screen, you can add products by clicking on Add Items.
On the add products screen, products can be added to the shop using 3 methods:
- Manual addition – Adding products manually while filling out all relevant details about the product, including media, price, shipping cost, important details, and product description.
- Adding via product feed – A product feed has become an essential asset in every eCommerce store, and in almost every system working with a shop, a product feed must be generated for extended capabilities (such as a product feed you create for Merchant Center for a Google Shopping campaign or for a dynamic remarketing campaign on Facebook).
- Adding via pixel – Connecting the shop to the pixel installed on your website will automatically pull products from the website to your new Facebook shop.
If you chose to add via pixel, Facebook will ask you to use an existing pixel or create a new pixel for your shop.
Adding products via product feed
If you chose a product feed, you will proceed to a page asking if your feed file is ready. If so, upload it to the system, and it will pull the products from the file and display them in your shop.
Next, you will need to set a Schedule, which basically means – how often do you want Facebook to update your product feed? If you update products in your store regularly and consequently your product feed updates frequently, select an update frequency of Daily or Hourly.
After confirming the settings, click on Save and Upload Feed. Facebook will process your product feed (an action that takes a few minutes). After that, you will return to the shop’s main screen and see that the products were uploaded successfully, and also understand the significance of uploading products via a feed compared to manual upload, which can take a lot of time. By clicking on Manage or Items on the menu, you will be able to see all the products in your shop.
Adding products manually
If you chose manual addition, you will be taken to a screen allowing you to add a single product or several simultaneously. You will need to fill in product details in a row – images, title (product name), description, website link, price (including selecting the desired currency), sale price (optional field), category (optional field), condition (new or used), status (indicates whether the item is active or archived), availability (in stock or not), brand (optional field), content ID (SKU), style (optional field), target age group (optional field), color (optional field), gender (optional field), material (optional field), pattern (optional field), and exact size (optional field).
The more details you fill out, the clearer your product will be to the customer, and the conversion rate will increase. When finished, click Upload Items.
After you have uploaded a certain number of products, you can manage them and the shop through the menu in the Commerce Manager on the left:
- Catalog – Everything related to the existing products in the store, items for sale, sets (collections you can build for products), issues (refers to issues that occurred or were created during and after uploading a product feed), data sources (your product feed), and events (the place to create a Facebook pixel for the store).
- Shops – Where all the Facebook shops you manage are located.
- Ads – An option to quickly create ads for the shops you manage.
- Insights – A tab that shows you basic and advanced statistics for your shops. An overview of traffic, clicks and conversions, performance, tagged content, catalog, audience demographics, and on-site events.
- Settings – All your account settings in Commerce Manager and for your shops, including: localization, product catalog, payment methods, permissions for additional users, shipping and return settings.
4. Publish the shop and additional connections
After you have properly added products and gone through all the shop settings, you can click Publish Shop to speed up the approval process with Facebook (if the shop has not been approved yet). In addition to publishing the shop, you can perform additional actions such as managing sales channels (additional social assets that can be connected to the shop), creating content from the shop page, setting up dynamic ads for customers who viewed products, customizing the shop’s design, and more.
In Conclusion
The final version of Facebook Shop has not yet been launched in Israel, and currently, it is not possible to process payments directly through the social network, but only to redirect customers to a dedicated website to check out there. Despite this significant obstacle, it is clear that it’s only a matter of time before all features arrive in Israel as well, allowing direct checkout without the customer having to navigate to another page. Even with limited features, the value Facebook Shop brings to brands through direct product exposure via social accounts makes a shop in Facebook’s ecosystem a game-changing option. Therefore, it is recommended for every eCommerce brand to build a Facebook shop alongside their website store to increase the amount of traffic viewing products and the business’s monthly revenue.
That’s it! If you made it this far, it means you have successfully created a Facebook shop from your Facebook page. It is important to stay alert and keep track of frequent changes within Facebook and make the necessary adjustments in the Facebook shop you opened.
Facebook Shop - Q&A
Facebook’s requirements for image sizes change from time to time, so it’s advisable to check Facebook’s guidelines for uploading products periodically.
Facebook has a list of prohibited products for sale. Some of the unapproved products are prescription drugs, weapons, animals, alcohol, and anything that promotes discrimination. In addition, only physical products can be sold, meaning you cannot sell software, app installations, or any other digital product.
- Your shop is not available in countries other than your own.
- Your Facebook page privacy setting might be configured incorrectly. Go to the page settings and make sure that the Page Visibility setting is marked as Page Published.
It usually takes 48 hours for Facebook to approve the shop after you click on publish shop. Immediately after Facebook’s approval, the products will appear on the page.
Facebook Shops are a shopping experience where businesses can easily create an online presence on Facebook for free.
About the Author
Dvir Naaman, 26 years old, an entrepreneur at heart, loves eCommerce websites, and specializes in SEO.
