Facebook ‘Shops’ announced to take on Shopify and others

We have seen that Facebook has always touted itself as not only being a social media platform but much more than that. As we all know, Facebook is majorly a social media network where people interact with each other. But there is a Facebook Marketplace as well where users can list items for sale and chat to potential customers through Messenger and WhatsApp or even Instagram and get sales from there directly without any cuts.

But now that we know the current situation related to Coronavirus pandemic and the market situation, it is seen that the economies around the world are going into a recession. This is the reason why we are also seeing people starting to change the way in which they shop and have even started spending less.

To encourage the small business owners to come online at the lowest cost possible, Facebook has just announced “Shops” which is an initiative by the company from Mark Zuckerburg. Facebook says that this initiative has been launched by them to mostly support the small business owners who might not want to open large e-commerce stores or not have the resources right now to do so.

It is, therefore, also announced that Facebook will not take any charges upfront or even take any revenue cuts from the items that are sold on Facebook Shops. Instead, Facebook reveals that their business model revolves around advertisement meaning that they will “eventually” make money only from ads served on the platform and nothing else.

On the other hand, we can see that the competition for Shopify owners has just increased 10 folds because we know Facebook’s reach and if it is so simple to create a store on Facebook and if there is an audience, why would you want to make Shopify stores where you also need to drive traffic out of nowhere.