Facebook Shops is the social media giant’s latest attempt to make sure businesses and customers are doing as much of their interacting as possible on their platform. And with 2.6 billion consumers active on Facebook every month, it’s hard to deny that it makes sense to have a presence there, especially for specialty independent retailers, with only ⅓ having an ecommerce-enabled website.
Headway Capital has pulled together a guide for small businesses to get up and running on Facebook Shops so here’s how to get started:
1. Adding a Shop to your Page
On your existing Facebook Page you should see a tab that says Shop (if not you’ll need to change your template to the Shopping Template) and from there you can get to Facebook’s Commerce Manager, which you’ll use to manage orders so you can sell directly on Shops. Once you’ve created your Commerce Manager account, you can get started.
2. Set up your inventory on Catalog Manager
Catalog Manager is where you manage your inventory of products and you can either add them manually or via a data feed if you have a large inventory. For shops with fewer than 50 products, Facebook recommends doing it manually. When you’ve added them, create Collections of similar or themed products to group them together for advertising purposes.
3. Customize your shop
This is the more fun part, but no less crucial if you want to maximize your chances of making sales. You can customize the look and layout of your store in Shop Builder, adding and removing Collections as required as well as choosing the colors to match your branding. When it’s done, you’re ready to put it live and start selling on Facebook Shops.
