In this final part of my series about social commerce, I’ll be giving you a quick overview of what it means to sell directly on social media. To manage your expections, I am intending to give you an overview – the topic us pretty large and for some features there are still regional limitations (as for me here in Germany for example).
If you have not read the previous parts of this series on Social Commerce, I highly recommend to read my intro to social commerce and the post about onsite social commerce first.
It’s not just about ads…
One misunderstanding I want to tackle early on is that social commerce does not just simply mean to throw ads at your product detail pages via the social network advertisement solutions. Ads can be a very important way to drive traffic to your products, but for offsite social commerce the traffic stays within the social network and is not redirected at your web shop’s product detail pages. That is of course very beneficial for these social networks (keep the audience inside the walled garden) and shifts the power to a large degree to them – definitely something a retailer has to understand. But it also means that ads and products can work perfectly together. The personalisation and targeting features of the social media platforms can be used to drive very specific traffic to the products you sell, thereby limiting friction and ultimately selling more.
Syncing the product catalog
When it comes to Facebook Commerce, your key to selling directly on the social media network, is the Catalog Manager. While you can choose to manage all the products directly there, it’s recommended to setup a product data source and import the products from your main product catalog in a regular fashion – for example daily or even hourly.
At this point, you can chooose to sell products out of your catalog via a Facebook page shop. Here in Europe, at this point, the only way to sell is by linking to your product detail pages – the button reads “Check out on Website” but direct selling is already enabled in the US for example.
The product feed
While the details of the supported product feed formats are explained here, I just quickly wanted to show you a sample feed in CSV format that I successfully setup with a Facebook Catalog:
"id","title","brand","img","image_link","description","price","availability","condition","link","google_product_category","oEmbedUrl","image_social_link","amount","currency","pinterest_availability"
"product1","Der Eimer","SaunaMeister","/img/eimer.jpg","https://really.nopants.dev/img/eimer.jpg","Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...","15 EUR","in stock","new","https://really.nopants.dev/products/product1","5663","https://really.nopants.dev/api/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Freally.nopants.dev%2Fproducts%2Fproduct1&format=json","https://really.nopants.dev/api/products/product1/social","15","EUR","instock"
The example above just shows one product, but it’s really quite straightforward.
Instagram and others…
Instagram, belonging to Facebook, is managed via the Facebook tools (e.g. uses the same product catalogs) but needs prior approval as described here. While quite often retailers are simply linking to product detail pages at this point (these might open in an inline web viewer on Instagram), I expect tighter integrations for the future. It’s an interesting and fast moving space, which we continue to research and prototype with.