4 Reasons Businesses Should Be Wary of Facebook Shops

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:15:07 -0700

Summer’s barely begun, but the biggest e-commerce news of the year just broke: Facebook Shops are now available to every business in the United States.

It was only a matter of time before Facebook made a major play for in-app purchasing. Instagram Checkout has been around since March 2019, and while it’s limited to select partners, it’s grown significantly. Just last month, Target became the first mass retailer to add Checkout. In April, Shopify launched its Shop app, allowing shoppers to browse, buy, and track orders from multiple stores in one place.

What sets Facebook Shops apart is its potential to create a frictionless buying experience at massive scale. If a business has enabled checkout, purchases are completed without leaving the app. Sounds perfect, right? Your customers already live on Facebook and Instagram; moving e-commerce there should mean lower acquisition costs. In fact, if you can host products natively on Facebook and Instagram, why bother managing an external website at all? Think how much work that is!

The problem with things that sound too good to be true is, well, they’re usually too good to be true. Don’t get us wrong — there may be opportunities in Facebook Shops. But before you rush in, we have a few words of caution.

Caution #1: Facebook sits between you and your customers.

It’s right there on the Commerce Manager Landing page:

"We don’t share customer data, aside from information needed to fulfill orders (name, email address, and delivery address). Customer email addresses cannot be used for marketing purposes."

In other words, Facebook...Read More

Elliott Hasiuk

4 Reasons Businesses Should Be Wary of Facebook Shops