Introducing Facebook Shops
Launched in the middle of lockdown – May 2020 – to help small businesses, Facebook & Instagram Shops are a simple, fast way to set up an online store for users to access your products. With a seamless customer experience, brands can choose the products they want to feature and can fully customize their shop.
The best thing about it? It’s completely free. All that you need is a page or profile and a product catalogue, with a minimum of four products.
There are a host of ways brands can take advantage of Shops. Users can find Shops through their Facebook pages and Instagram profiles. Brands can add product tags to their organic posts, tag products in Stories and even add product tags to live-streams. The Shop also becomes more visible to users through the Discovery Shopping Tab in Instagram, further expanding a brand’s reach.
Once consumers have arrived in the shop, they can then browse the customized shoppable collections, curated by the brands, and save items or purchase. Users in the US will also be able to directly purchase products through Instagram without leaving the app through its Checkout function – the Facebook-owned app is currently trialing this feature in the UK and it may expand the service globally soon.
But why else should brands be using Shops? The performance speaks for itself. Below are some stats from three brands of varying size.
Zimba, a tooth whitening brand, saw 1,200 incremental orders from Shops over 2 months. Of those orders, they also saw a 6.7% higher average order value compared to purchases made on their website.
Jane, a boutique marketplace for women’s fashion, accessories, home décor, children’s clothing and more, saw a huge impact to their business by launching shops. From July 2020-Feb 2021, 80% of their total social sales came through Shops. They also had $419,762 in incremental sales over a 9-month time period, with 680,618 new visitors.
Missoma, a British jewelry brand, also saw a significant uplift in sales by launching Shops and within one month they had 45,459 new visitors to their shop, 29,690 add to carts and 5,641 orders from their Instagram Shop.
If you haven’t already, we would highly recommend that you set up your Shop right now (if you can), whether you are a large or small business. With social commerce buyers expected to rise by more than 20% in the next two years, it’s more important than ever to get your products out there for customers’ eyes. Plus, with the Facebook auction becoming ever most competitive, it’s paramount to look at new ways to optimize your ROAS.
At PHA, we have experience across multiple accounts with setting up Shops, if you’re interested in contacting us to find out more, get in touch with us today.
