Facebook Shops: Meta's Continued Push into E-Commerce

E-Commerce continues its significant global expansion, maintaining strong momentum well into 2025. Worldwide retail e-commerce sales were estimated around USD 6.3 trillion in 2024 and are projected to exceed USD 7 trillion in 2025. This sustained growth has fostered a diverse ecosystem of online selling platforms – among the prominent tools available for businesses leveraging social commerce is the established Facebook Shops feature, allowing companies to create integrated storefronts on Facebook and Instagram

What is Facebook Shops?

Facebook Shops is a service that aims to provide a seamless online shopping experience by allowing businesses to display and sell products directly from their Facebook page or Instagram profile. Business owners can select products they want featured from their catalog, and even customize the look and feel of their shop with a cover image and matching accent colors to better showcase their brand. Through this endeavour, Facebook intends to connect business owners, regardless of their size or budget, to customers all around the world.

What is Facebook Shops Philippines Lokal

Why should I use Facebook Shops?

With over 3.98 billion active monthly users , Facebook is undeniably one of the best platforms to showcase your business. Not only does it offer low-cost marketing strategies, but it also lets you talk to customers and provide instant support where needed. As opposed to the Marketplace feature launched in 2016, which allows users to sell personal belongings, Shops is primarily aimed at businesses — potentially posing a challenge to commerce rivals such as Shopee, Lazada, or Amazon. Users spend significant time daily on Meta's platforms – global averages from sources like Shopify suggest around 30 minutes on Facebook and 33 minutes on Instagram each day. This daily engagement presents opportunities for businesses to reach users through ads or stories that lead to their Shop.

In any case, adding your business to another platform such as Facebook Shops can broaden reach, and reports indicate millions of businesses utilize Meta's commerce tools. But what notable features does Shops have?

Key Features of Facebook Shops

Facebook Shops provides integrated storefronts for businesses — you can learn more about its features from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook live video, which you can see here:

If you don’t want to watch the video, we’ve compiled the list of features in this handy guide explaining we know so far.

Easy Set Up

If you’re already present on Facebook or Instagram and have a catalog of products set up, then Facebook will automatically set up your own Facebook Shop for you without you having to do anything at all. If you’re already on Shopify or other business back-end tools, a few clicks can let you import your inventory and let set up your Facebook Shop quickly. Even if you’re a new business owner who’s just about to create a Facebook or Instagram page, setting up a Facebook Shop is easy at it simply requires cataloging your products and highlighting what you want featured.

Streamlined Shopping Experience

Credit: Facebook

Aside from Shops being easy and free to create, once you’ve set it up on Facebook or Instagram, customers can easily see your stories, featured products, and have the ability to buy them right then and there. Not to mention, Shops will be native and fast — this means you won’t have to go through the trouble of switching to a slow web browser or re-entering your credit card details every time you want to buy something.

E-Commerce Integration

Shopify, Big Commerce, WooCommerce, Channel Advisor, CedCommerce, Tienda Nube, Feedonomics, Cafe24

Zuckerberg also announced that they’re partnering with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Channel Advisor, CedCommerce, Tienda Nube, Feedonomics, and Cafe24 to allow small businesses to integrate with a strong and open ecosystem of tools. This will help them manage their customer journey from start to finish, while giving them the freedom to determine how much they want to integrate.

Cross-Platform Consistency

Credit: Facebook

Shops will be accessible from all other Facebook-owned apps: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, and can be shown in stories or highlights and appear in ads across the platforms. This means that when you set up a Shop, you’ll be able to see it and sell your products directly from both your Instagram and Facebook pages to start. Eventually, Shops also plans to allow customers to buy products directly from messaging apps (Messenger and WhatsApp) as well. When it comes to questions, support, or even tracking deliveries, customers can also message you through WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram Direct.

Dedicated Panels for Shops

The people over at Facebook want you and your business to be seen — and to do this, they’re launching features across their apps that will help people discover small businesses. One notable feature is a dedicated shopping tab on Instagram along with a destination inside the Explore tab to help you find and buy products that might catch your fancy. Zuckerberg also mentions that there may be a Live shopping feature that can let you shop on Live in real-time.

AI and AR Usage

Finally, Facebook plans to include AI and augmented reality (AR) tech in Shops to create a better shopping experience. With AI, Facebook can automatically identify and tag products throughout your feed to let you easily click-through to purchase things you might like. Additionally, anything you highlight in your online storefront can be “tried on” by customers, such as sunglasses and lipstick or other make up, or even furniture in a room.

In a nutshell

Facebook Shops is still gradually being rolled out in the coming months, and much information is still up in the air. However, the features, the platform, and the potential ease of use provides an exciting new frontier for e-commerce or online shops in the Philippines .

Stay tuned here in Lokal - we'll continuously update this page to provide all the information for Facebook shops.

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Facebook Shops: Meta's Continued Push into E-Commerce

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