Is Facebook Shop Doomed To Fail?

[SimplyMyLove]

Just to clarify, I am not social media expert, and only came across the Facebook Shop yesterday, but immediately found it useless.

The most shocking thing is that this ecommerce platform does not import product feed, as I was told by its support team.

"
Hi Ken,

At this stage, there is no way to bulk upload items into the store. This is a feature we will be looking at adding shortly.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Warm regards
Paul
"

Also it doesn't seem to allow me to create multi-variation listings. So for 8 Gb and 16 Gb USB flash drives, I have to create two listings for the same design.

I quite like the idea that I could offer customers who liked my page a discounted price, but only found that "Almost nobody visits a Facebook page once they like it." as it says in a blog "5 Reasons Facebook Stores Were Doomed to Fail".

Anyone opened their Facebook shops and how do you feel about it?

 

[Amy POPContent]

I've never opened a Facebook shop, but I agree, once you like a page you don't normally go back to visit it - or if you do, it's very rarely. However, if you had a great deal that was Facebook exclusive, writing a post about it to your followers, that linked to your Facebook shop, would be something I would be more inclined to check out.

I suppose you could just as easily do the same thing though but link to your current shop...

 

[SimplyMyLove]

Many thanks Amy, and welcome to the UKBF

 

[fisicx]

It's not doomed. If you are selling hallo kitty stuff or one direction posters you might do OK but it's not going to be much use for mainstream products. Some reports show that many likes and shares these days are bot generated so have even less value.

Some people do very well selling on facebook but they are usually very niche. They are the exceptions, most people don't do at all well.

It's not even a good marketing platform. My daughter likes and shares all sorts of stuff. She has go bazillions of friends who see what she likes and shares. Nobody has ever brought anything and almost nobody has ever followed a link to the shared website.

 

[SimplyMyLove]

It's not doomed. If you are selling hallo kitty stuff or one direction posters you might do OK but it's not going to be much use for mainstream products. Some reports show that many likes and shares these days are bot generated so have even less value.

Some people do very well selling on facebook but they are usually very niche. They are the exceptions, most people don't do at all well.

It's not even a good marketing platform. My daughter likes and shares all sorts of stuff. She has go bazillions of friends who see what she likes and shares. Nobody has ever brought anything and almost nobody has ever followed a link to the shared website.

Many thanks indeed for your kind advice, and I think I'll close the Facebook shop at the end of the free 7-day trial. I completely agree that the number of likes and shares does not really help with the sales. Believe it or not, one of my colleagues even bought thousands of likes in the past and day-dreamed of getting hundreds of orders overnight for his start-up business. We laughed our head off.

 

[Ashley_Price]

It's how most businesses operate, via a "Ready, fire, aim" approach. Apple are famous for this, launch the product, then make adjustments as feedback (read complaints) start flooding in.

Often you can only see hows things do or don't work once they are live and you get customer feedback. And that seems to be what Facebook have done with the Shop.

From your post it sounds like it's far from perfect at the moment, but I would assume as time goes on and more customers give similar feedback then they will bring in those services.

But not being able to bulk upload products does therefore suggest it's meant for the smaller business with just a few items, or perhaps a creative type to sell their wares (I assume a bit like etsy).

 

[Jeff Nev]

I was always under the impression Facebook allowed you to import your product feed? Or is this a relatively new feature?

 

[SimplyMyLove]

No, I've contacted their seller support team and the answer is negative.