Facebook Starts Building Shopping Functionality Into Pages

Facebook pages will soon allow businesses to open storefronts on their Pages. The digital storefronts will also have a "Buy" button to help you get items you have developed a fancy for. This would be useful to both brick-and-mortar stores with traditional retail models to e-commerce sites as well.

"With the shop section on the page, we are now providing businesses with the ability to showcase their products directly on the page," Facebook product marketing manager Emma Rodgers was quoted by BuzzFeed News as saying.

While the feature is currently in the testing phase, some Pages already offer the complete experience with Buy buttons that allow the users to buy and checkout the product directly from Facebook.

The company had started testing the Buy button feature with small and medium businesses in the US back in July last year. At the time, it had said, "We're beginning to test a new feature to help businesses drive sales through Facebook in News Feed and on Pages... With this feature, people on desktop or mobile can click the "Buy" call-to-action button on ads and Page posts to purchase a product directly from a business, without leaving Facebook."

Facebook currently has a few partners it is working with but is not opening up about who its launch partners would be.

Apart from letting businesses sell their products on Facebook, the social networking giant has in the recent past been experimenting with ways for users to sell their goods on the network as well, within Facebook Groups. In a sense, the company is taking on classifieds sites like OLX as well as second-hand good sites like eBay.

The company was this week also reported to be working on a Facebook Messenger-based virtual assistant called Moneypenny that is powered by real people and would help people look for stuff, apart from answer shopping queries.

Back in March, Facebook unveiled the Messenger for Businesses platform that allowed business to chat with customers, and vice versa.

Written with inputs from IANS