Turn Facebook into an Ecommerce Channel for your Adventure Brand
How are you using Facebook to grow your business? Hopefully, you have a dedicated brand page and are actively attracting followers, driving traffic to your website, and leveraging the incredibly powerful advertising capabilities of the largest social network. All of these are important, of course, but don’t forget about Facebook as a sales channel.
On any given day, 1.4 billion active users are on Facebook globally. What’s more, the average user spends over 35 minutes a day on the site. According to HubSpot, 78% of U.S. shoppers have discovered products on Facebook. With that kind of reach and engagement, selling your adventure products and services right on Facebook is a phenomenal opportunity.
How to Sell Adventure Products and Services on Facebook
Setting up a Facebook Shop isn’t hard, and it’s free. Although Facebook doesn’t charge to set up a shop although they highly encourage businesses to advertise once your shop is up and running. Depending on your current business situation, two primary options exist to add a shop to your Facebook page:
- Create a shop directly on your Facebook business page
- Connect your existing Online Store from your website to Facebook
Let’s take a look at both options.
1. Create a shop directly on your Facebook Page
If your business is just starting out in ecommerce, setting up a shop right on Facebook is a great starting point. Any business that has a Facebook business page can add a shop as a tab on your page. Once you add products, customers can browse and buy them without going to a different website and you can manage all orders from your page. You don’t have to pay monthly or minimum fees to have a Facebook Shop.
Facebook has a few requirements to creating a shop:
- Sell physical items only
- Agree with Facebook’s Merchant Terms
- Link to a valid bank account
- Have a Tax Identification Number (TIN)
- Set up Stripe as the Payment Processor
Shop features can vary depending on your location:
- Add as many products as you want: You don’t need to upload a product catalog anywhere else first, and there’s no limit on how many products you can add.
- Customize your product inventory: You can organize your products into different collections so your customers can browse your shop by category.
- Communicate with customers: Your customers can message you with questions.
- Get insights: You can see views, clicks and purchases for each of your products.
- Distribute your products broadly: When you have a shop, your products may appear in Marketplace, so more people might discover them. This is currently a limited feature.
The image above is a Shop we set up for our client Stream2Sea. Check out their Facebook Shop.
2. Connect your existing Online Store on your website to Facebook
If you have an existing ecommerce business and you built it using any of the major ecommerce website platforms such as Shopify or WooCommerce, setting up a Facebook Shop that connects directly to your existing online store is a simple process. Websites built on WordPress can install a WooCommerce plugin that pulls your product catalog right into your Facebook Shop. This enables your Facebook shoppers to click through to your website to purchase your products or services.
We recommend this approach for selling on Facebook for adventure brands for several reasons:
Operational efficiency: No need to manage separate order processing, inventories, and payment processors. Creating a seamless funnel for customers to shop your products on Facebook and complete the purchase on your website is simple and efficient.
Broader Functionality: While Facebook has limited ecommerce functions compared, Woo Commerce and Shopify are sophisticated online selling platforms that enable you to configure your store how you want. For example, Facebook has fewer payment options for your customers to choose from. Also, since you can only sell physical products with a Facebook hosted shop, Option 1 doesn’t work for adventure parks, outfitters and lodges.
Drives Traffic: As important as it is to engage your customers across multiple platforms, it remains vital that you own your online brand presence and that means getting customers to come to your website. Having Facebook shoppers complete their purchase on your site encourages a deeper level of engagement post-purchase and will help build an ongoing relationship versus a one-time transaction.
Don’t Forget About Instagram
However you set up your Facebook Shop, it makes sense to extend your online sales effort onto Facebook’s other powerhouse social brand Instagram. As you probably know, Instagram is a rapidly growing social platform and has the highest levels of engagement of any social network. Connecting Instagram to your Facebook Shop enables you to tag products in your Instagram posts and make those posts shoppable.
Where is your business in its ecommerce journey?
The team at Liquid Spark can help you develop the right strategy to grow your online product sales and we can even set your shop up for you. Let’s have a conversation to figure out the best way for you to grow your online sales with Facebook!
