If you are an avid user of Facebook, you would have definitely come across a couple of pages created by blog store owners or conventional store owners trying to promote their stores or even sell their products there.
Early Selling On Facebook Efforts Though their efforts in trying to promote their stores may have paid off somewhat, the same could not be said for their efforts in trying to sell items there.
This was because Facebook's natural features were created to help people socialize and not facilitate ecommerce.
Lack Of Features Blog store merchants encountered the same problems on Facebook as they had when they tried to sell on their blog stores.
Unlike on a proper shopping cart software powered store, there were no features to help merchants followup on aborted orders.
There were no features to aid merchants cross sell their products.
There were not features like content sliders that help draw attention to products and services.
There were also no features like the product zoom tool to help improve conversion by letting shoppers have a closer look at the item.
The list goes on.
Mindset Of Facebook Users To be fair, the mindset of most Facebook users back then was to socialize and not to shop.
So that really did not help ecommerce on Facebook.
That was one of the reasons why ecommerce software providers were reluctant to create apps to help merchants sell on Facebook a few years ago.
Now fast forward a few years and every major shopping cart software provider has a Facebook shopping app.
This change came about because Facebook has evolved into more than just a place to socialize.
It has become a virtual mall where people can choose to hangout, watch video, chat and shop.
Rise Of The Social Shop App Most of these shopping cart providers have included this as a standard feature in most of their ecommerce plans.
This makes it very economical for blog store owners to migrate their businesses to a proper store, complete with proper shopping cart software features.
And as a bonus, they get a powerful social shop app that lets them leverage the power of Facebook for free.
It is like having two stores for the price of one.
Naturally, Facebook stores would not contain all the bells and whistles of proper shopping cart software powered stores but these social shops are a really economical way to improve overall sales figures.
A number of merchants who have actively promoted their Facebook stores have reported an increase in overall sales of up to 5%.
That is not a bad return for an app available for free with most shopping cart subscription plans.