Facebook’s E-Comm Push Pays Off With One Million Active Shops

Need to Know

• There are now one million active Shops on Facebook with more than 250 million interactions per month, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
• Speaking in a Clubhouse discussion, Zuckerberg said he anticipates Shop growth to be “explosive” over the next five years.
• Facebook launched Shops in May 2020 in the US and expanded it to Canada and the UK in February.

Analysis

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has revealed some key data on Facebook Shops’ performance so far.

On Thursday, Zuckerberg said that there are currently one million active Shops on Facebook, with more than 250 million people interacting with Shops each month. In a Clubhouse discussion that also included Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and Josh Constantine, head of content and principal investor at SignalFire, Zuckerberg said that the early success of Shops suggests the product should continue to grow rapidly in use and popularity.

Admitting that “it’s still obviously early” to make hard calls about Shops, Zuckerberg said that “the progress in terms of being able to ramp up some of this stuff and all of the different tools that now exist … it’s really amazing. I think that the next five years are going to be really explosive in terms of the potential across a lot of these verticals.”

Zuckerberg added that, compared to early conversations within the company had about how people would use Facebook Shops, he now believes the vertical is “well on track to be something that’s going to be increasingly important to people.”

Facebook has been keen to integrate e-commerce into its platform since as long ago as 2014, when the company first discussed adding a “buy” button to allow users to purchase goods through advertisements or posts on the site. Facebook Shops, which launched in the US in May 2020 and expanded to the UK and Canada last month, is a mobile-first shopping experience that allows businesses and vendors to create a store on Facebook and Instagram for free. Facebook Shops allows merchants to connect with customers through WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram Direct, and allows users to make purchases from directly within Facebook or Instagram, without navigating away from the app.

Facebook Shops hit a significant milestone in February when Shop Pay, the payments tool from Shopify, was integrated into Facebook and Instagram Shops, marking the first time Shop Pay was made available outside of Shopify’s own platform. At the time, Carl Rivera, the GP of Shop Pay, said that Shopify will “continue to work with Facebook to bring a number of Shopify services and products to these platforms to make social selling so much better.”

On Thursday, Zuckerberg also commented on upcoming changes to the Apple iOS that will make it more difficult for companies such as Facebook to track user activity for targeted ads, saying he believes the changes could actually benefit Facebook Shops. “It’s possible that we may even be in a stronger position if Apple’s changes encourage more businesses to conduct more commerce on our platforms by making it harder for them to use their data in order to find the customers that would want to use their products outside of our platforms,” he said.