Facebook Shops Turns Business Pages Into Online Stores (engadget.com) 7
Facebook and Instagram are making their biggest push yet into online shopping with Facebook Shops, which allows businesses to turn their Facebook and Instagram pages into online storefronts for their fans and followers. From a report: Facebook, as with pretty much all its recent product updates, is billing the feature as one that will further help small businesses affected by the economic fallout of COVID-19. But the update, which is starting to roll out now, is also the company's biggest move into e-commerce yet. With Shops, business owners can create a dedicated "shop" section of their Facebook or Instagram page and build out a catalog of their products for users to browse and buy. Importantly, most actual purchases won't be happening on Facebook. Product listings will direct to a business' existing website -- unless it's one of a handful of companies using Instagram's in-app checkout feature.
Sounds like affiliated linking... (Score:3)
I imagine facebook would want a percentage of the order if the person discovered the item on facebook, even if they direct to the business website.
It's like making a guide to build something and having links to specific websites for the items you would need to build whatever the guide is for. The guide writer would get a small amount for directing traffic to the site selling something.
I could actually seeing this working out okay for facebook. Imagine you are some sort of artist and use facebook. It would be an easy way to advertise essentially. Curious how much facebook would charge but I could see this maybe working.
Re: Sounds like affiliated linking... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Does Amazon have a Facebook Page (Score:2)
Deeply dislike this (Score:2)
Too many businesses already provide no online contact mechanisms (and frequently no phone number either) and instead give you their facebook or twitter accounts.
This will lead in a couple of years to them ditching their website altogether and doing all their sales through facebook or instagram.
Sorry but no. I refuse to sign up to those invasive abusive services in order to engage with businesses, whether for support or to make a purchase.
The internet just got smaller :(