21 ms·

Introducing Facebook Shops

432 points by davidbarker 6y ago

jameslevy 6y ago
"We’re also working more closely with partners like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce..." Is Facebook Shops not a direct competitor to Shopify? Or is this just "embrace, extend, and extinguish"?
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  I wonder if slashdot has a Borg avatar for Zuck yet...
  - r00fus 6y ago
    No props/photoshop needed.
    - bfung 6y ago
      Savage.
  - arthurcolle 6y ago
    This image works pretty well: https://i.imgflip.com/288d4p.jpg https://i.imgflip.com/288d4p.jpg
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      Looks like slashdot beta may not do avatars. Fuck slashdot bêta.
- nickff 6y ago
  My guess is that they will try to integrate Shopify sites into the platform, to give the FB Shops platform some momentum, then gradually push the non FBS stores down the page. My reasoning is that they are emulating Google. Alternatively, they could be looking to make FB Shops an advertising platform, similar to Amazon Seller Central, where they don't care who you buy from, but they want each seller to pay for ads and/or payment processing.
  - basch 6y ago
    Although being a simple shopify drop in replacement would have its advantages in simplicity, there is probably more long term potential if they embrace multi-channel sales, and become a storefront management tool ala https://www.ecomdash.com/ https://www.ecomdash.com/ and https://www.shipstation.com/ https://www.shipstation.com/ Some people are going to keep shopping on amazon, some on ebay, some on walmart, some on etsy, some directly on websites. Im not saying that's what they are doing, but its a way to skim off all transactions instead of trying to force business into facebook.
    - nerfhammer 6y ago
      Probably the right answer. If you have a shop that's getting some sales on etsy, amazon or ebay or wherever else you're not going to want to close it down in favor of facebook – you'll just open a second storefront there.
  - gowld 6y ago
    Amazon cares who you buy from. Amazon Basics pushes out sellers.
    - type0 6y ago
      Not just Basics, they have so many other brands of their own that most customers will never even know that.
  - codecamper 6y ago
    Your guess appears to be wrong. I couldn't find anything about FB Shops using Shopify platform. Only that you can stock your store from the Shopify store.. which is a tool that Shopify provides. In other words, Shopify is using the FB Merchant and Store APIs. Like anyone can. It seems like a bad deal for Shopify sellers. They must pay FB 5% and Shopify 2% of each transaction. If they jettisoned Shopify, they'd just pay FB 5%.
- xoxoy 6y ago
  Both partner and potential competitor? Depends how serious FB wants to invest in building out their own e-commerce backend platform. Not sure it is that valuable to them when IG is the more differentiating part of the product.
  - jklein11 6y ago
    Why not just fork Magento? I bet with Facebook's infrastructure you could get it running at Shopify scale for a few million bucks a year.
- jameslk 6y ago
  For a lot of stores, Shopify is just an API for your store. There's a big trend in ecommerce of going "headless" and using Shopify's API to push your products out to many channels. In that sense, Shopify is merely a special database (similar to Salesforce) to track your customers, orders, products, inventory, discounts, etc which is then pushed out to channels like Facebook Shop or Amazon.
  - machbio 6y ago
    Yes, its interesting shopify have a product called Lite (https://www.shopify.com/lite https://www.shopify.com/lite) which does not have any UI
    - codecamper 6y ago
      Nothing lite about the payment terms. You pay them over a 100 a year plus part of every transaction. For keeping a database of photos and descriptions & integrating with APIs? Doesn't that seem overpriced?
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Interesting - sounds like gumroad? https://gumroad.com/ https://gumroad.com/
  - codecamper 6y ago
    Shopify seems to overcharge for that sort of functionality. Merchants are paying Shopify per transaction while customers shop on another site & pay using Google Pay, Paypal, FB Pay, or Apple Pay.
- mrkramer 6y ago
  I don't get it. If you buy something from Facebook Shop does Facebook take a fee or Shopify for example. I'm guessing Facebook is trying to get rid off websites and essentially Google and hoping all discovery happens on Facebook and Instagram. I'm wondering how Facebook Shops is going to impact Shopify,Amazon and Google Shopping in the long term.
  - PhilipA 6y ago
    They will probably do it for free, and then just limit visibility unless you pay to advertise the products.
  - codecamper 6y ago
    Facebook is going to handle everything (search, display, cart, checkout, payments) and will charge 5%. Shopify is doing nothing on a transaction level & yet they have a stock that requires growth, so they are charging 2% per transaction. I kid you not.
- ksec 6y ago
  I read the tweet from Shopify CEO and I thought Facebook went and partnered with Shopify only. Turns out that is not true. Anyway out of all those listed, I would think Shopify has the biggest to gain. While I dont know enough about the possibility of Facebook doing Triple E, at least All of a sudden Shopify's insane valuation makes a little more sense and justifying the possible potential. Currently market cap at ˜90B and trading at ˜50x revenue.
  - xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
    Wow, I haven't been following Shopify, but their stock is going gangbusters. A mid level employee who joined around their IPO, with ~$300k of stock vesting over four years would be worth almost $18MM today. Wow.
    - codecamper 6y ago
      Just thank J Powell and Trump.
  - codecamper 6y ago
    Not really. Shopify is only using FB's merchant APIs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/commerce-platform/ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/commerce-platform/ And that's it. They are allowing Shopify merchants to publish their inventories to the FB store. In exchange Shopify wants 2% of every transaction and 30 bucks a month or 9 bucks for their "lite" version. Or you can just use FB directly to stock your store & pay Shopify zilch.
- kamilszybalski 6y ago
  It's a really interesting question. My gut tells me that Shopify is looking for a suitor and this is facebook's way of de-risking (validating?) a potential investment.
  - boringg 6y ago
    Shopify is definitely not looking for a suitor - no way. They still have so much growth potential - that rocketship is looking to add more channels. Once on Shopify it's tough to leave - that whole switching cost.
  - blahbhthrow3748 6y ago
    A lot of Shopify's competitive advantage comes from being a giant, Canadian tech company. Similar to Blackberry before it, the government is extremely generous and investors price the stock accordingly. If Shopify moved to the States or was acquired by an American company I think it would take away that unique appeal. Also the founder is an egomaniac and would never sell.
- paxys 6y ago
  Nowadays it's more "embrace, extend, and acquire"
furtive808 6y ago
Is it US only?
- rnotaro 6y ago
  US Only and selected shops for now.
_jal 6y ago
A whole class of retailer that will be blocked at my router. The Balkanization is well underway.
- itsspring 6y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I’ve blocked Facebook in my DNS hosts file & thankfully Firefox has a Facebook fence to isolate their trackers.
  - swagonomixxx 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, has doing this disrupted your web browsing experience in any way? I'd like to do this but I'm kind of afraid of alienating 75% of the web that relies on the FB JS SDK for something (I'm not really sure if this is the case, but it might be?) EDIT: thanks for the responses. Will block at DNS :)
    - executive 6y ago
      no problems blocking FB JS.
    - yepthatsreality 6y ago
      The only problems I could see is that some services that ONLY auth via Facebook will not work. Having stated that, consider if you eliminate Facebook from your life and have issues on the web, and the answer to those issues is not "create a Facebook account" then it should be relatively safe to remove Facebook from your life.
      - swagonomixxx 6y ago
        Yep, I've already deleted my FB account since like 2014 but I know that a lot of sites load their SDK in order to track still. Thanks.
    - mikestew 6y ago
      By "disrupt", do you mean "improves immensely"? It depends on how much FOMO you suffer from. For instance, the folks that I used to do music jams with (picture middle-aged folk playing bluegrass) have moved to FB Live(?) for some things. I don't see those, nor participate. That's okay, we do our own non-proprietary chat once a week in lieu of live jammin'. Local animal shelter posts stuff on FB, most of which I can live without. Does shit break because something, something FB SDK? Nope, at least not shit I care about, and not FB. But for the most part, I get to mostly forget that FB even exists.
suyash 6y ago
Why have 2 different shops on Facebook and Instagram, it will lead to more confusion. Also what about for folks who don't use either of those services?
- kixiQu 6y ago
  What, all 12 of them? More seriously, I don't think they're requiring exclusivity.
- derefr 6y ago
  Plenty of brands were already doing lead-gen to their products through Instagram, whether through ads, or just by creating a photo/video of their product that started trending (in a way similar to how you'd expect a pretty craftwork to trend on Pinterest.) I think Instagram even already has the inline "purchase the thing this is a picture of" flow—though right now it's just in the form of a modal webview to the partner's shop product page for the relevant item. The "Instagram Shop" part of the offering they're describing, sounds less like an independent system, and more like a way for independent creators to get the same benefits as those large partners, where they can take a picture of the fancy sweater they made, have it appear on trending, and then there can be a "Buy" button right there on the post everyone's sharing. It's an Instagram integration for the Facebook Shop system. I also don't think there's going to be a separate "Instagram Shop" landing page for a given account, per se; if there is an index view, it'll just be a collection of the buyable items posted by a given Instagram account. The expectation, though, would be that "buyable" posts would just be part of a brand page's regular feed of posts. The "buy button" is just an enhancement to what the account was already doing, rather than a whole separate storefront to set up. I'm guessing, in the end, what you'd really be purchasing via the Instagram hosted inline purchase flow, is a Facebook Shop product SKU. You'd probably get an email from Facebook Shopping about your product, etc. In other words, "Facebook Shop" would be a payment processor / hosted commerce backend, that happens to have a flagship front-end UX; and Instagram would be an alternative front-end UX. > Also what about for folks who don't use either of those services? Given the way they seem to be building it, there's definitely some backend core with an API that looks a lot like Shopify's API. I'm guessing they'll offer third-party developer access to that API.
- 6y ago
foobar_ 6y ago
It's interesting how people here are happy to criticise "chyna" when facebook is really the same thing with a corporate logo and a backdoor. The difference is china has a frontdoor. Facebook also runs in your phone with spyware.
- alharith 6y ago
  Let's just say you are correct, framing and all. So the two options in your scenario are collecting data without consent. The difference then becomes feeding information to a US corporation, which benefits 25,000+ US citizens through direct employment, benefits the countless stock portfolios that hold facebook stock, and benefits the US tech business as a whole, or a brutalist authoritarian regime, hostile to US interests that murders it's own citizens. Both are wrong and need correction, but I'll take facebook's "spyware" any day.
- ancarda 6y ago
  This thread seems mostly negative towards Facebook (good - fuck em') but your comment seems to suggest you think there's some bias here. Are people on HN being too positive about Facebook?
  - foobar_ 6y ago
    Maybe its just me but I have noticed a sharp rise in anti-china rhetoric here. For example there is a dead comment below which cites America is not a totalitarian regime that hurts its citizens, which is not true because you have Native Americans and racism in America which affects plenty of minorities. As a programmer one of our tasks is to build abstractions and simplifications. To me it looks like facebook has a near monopoly on a social network that collects and sells data and China has one big social network, that has everyone on it. From a strictly interface perspective both are the same. Both have backdoors. What I find troubling is that people seem to accept Facebook as a hero when you could as well make the case the china is more heroic for its people. It was china the pulled a majority of people out of poverty not U.S.A which has a lot of homeless people. Capitalism with monopolies that sleep with the government is not that different from chinese style capitalism, which on paper has to serve the people. The biggest problem with capitalism is the "legal person" definition and limited liability exception. Offshoring is also a shit idea clearly. Talking about china is relevant for hackers because probably china might be more sincere about open source than microsoft with its profit motive. Anti-china rhetoric will just ruin such discussions rather than allow people to get balanced perspectives.
flyGuyOnTheSly 6y ago
Instagram shop charges 5%+ transaction fees... (more if the product is priced below $8) is this going to be the same pricing model? Because if so it's a non-starter for myself and anyone comfortable with the stripe api and/or shopify at least.
lykahb 6y ago
The main source of revenue for FB is advertising. They are able to offer Facebook Shops at a loss to get the market share. Many small businesses are mainly present online as a shop on a platform and a FB page. This is bad news for Etsy.
A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
I dislike Facebook, but this is a really smart way to grab a market share. Most businesses need minimal online presence so FB front is sufficient. I won't see those businesses, but I know I am a minority, when it comes to this.
- seph-reed 6y ago
  > really smart Maybe effective? Smart implies a bit too much imo. For a while now, users have been using pages to promote their businesses and using FB pay for transactions. It seems this was inevitable, and I'm more surprising how long it took than how "really smart" it is.
  - jasonv 6y ago
    I work in banking. Everything we do, that's easier elsewhere, is harder in banking, because it's a bank (regulated, money, etc). Everything Facebook builds has to scale to billions immediately. Could be a contributing factor to why it took them this long to do this.
    - seph-reed 6y ago
      That makes a lot of sense. Does raise the stakes quite a bit too, which makes the decision maybe a little bit difficult. So the engineers who make the thing happen are for sure smart. And the researchers who prove it should be profitable are also pretty smart. But the idea itself -- trying to take over some other market that they already have a foothold in -- is pretty obvious.
    - cameronbrown 6y ago
      Why would it? They can do controlled rollouts if they want. Core design has to scale, but I seriously doubt they'd be planning for millions/QPS right out the gate.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Random non rant: Thank you for being self aware enough to know that you are in the minority when it comes to not having Facebook. Most posts by people who don’t use FB and post to HN feign ignorance and say something like “I haven’t used FB in 10 years. Does anyone still use it?”
draw_down 6y ago
To get started with, or to run a really simple small business, probably not a bad idea. But a real business should think hard about depending on this.
dzonga 6y ago
FB, just came with a bang. with how prevalent fb is internationally. they can capture majority of the market share. sad day, for open solutions like woocommerce. & if FB had managed to get libra, off the ground, then they would be transacting more amounts of currency than anyone in the world. I won't put Shopify in the discussion, as they are only available in select 1st world countries.
- ibdf 6y ago
  Woocommerce fails to deliver a product that doesn't require a developer and or thousands in add-ons. It works for a very basic shop but after that you will need to hire a developer.
  - Kye 6y ago
    It's $45/month from the company behind WordPress for the majority of companies that don't need that level of customization. Past that, it's probably still cheaper than rolling your own solution or doing a panicked migration off Facebook Shops when they start closing the doors.
swagonomixxx 6y ago
With the rise of services like Shopify, Etsy, etc. why are independent product manufacturers in the US / Europe still using Amazon? Is it the lack of the supply chain / item delivery that Amazon provides so well or is it something else? Hearing about how Amazon undercuts pretty much every seller on their system makes me think that sellers would be willing to jump in a heartbeat if given a viable alternative. Facebook Shops seems like a Shopify clone to me ... but I'm not sure as I haven't really used Shopify (and I keep mistaking it for Spotify).
- dmalik 6y ago
  It's backed by 3rd parties. https://news.shopify.com/shopify-partners-with-facebook-to-help-businesses-launch-branded-facebook-shops https://news.shopify.com/shopify-partners-with-facebook-to-h...
- somebrody 6y ago
  > why are independent product manufacturers in the US / Europe still using Amazon? They do it to sell to people that are shopping on Amazon in spite of every problem with it. Never being undercut by Amazon isn't important to these sellers. Think, "I don't want to live in a world where someone gets undercut by Amazon better than us".
- nickff 6y ago
  Many potential customers use Amazon as a search tool, as well as a source for (slightly) trustworthy reviews. If you are off Amazon, you miss out on those customers. In addition to that, making your own webstore used to be more complicated and difficult than it is now; platforms like Shopify have really lowered the barrier to market entry.
  - swagonomixxx 6y ago
    That's true. Amazon unfortunately has gained way too much market share for someone to forego being a seller on there.
- stevekemp 6y ago
  Shopify is pretty good, but if you have a small independant shop the hard part is getting visitors. On that basis etsy is better, because it gets a lot of traffic, but I think facebook will be even more popular. I'm a member of a couple of local groups, largely for buying/selling kids clothing/toys. Something like that wouldn't work so well on other platforms - getting cheap stuff locally. Of course etsy has its own problems, with a large number of their shops just being fronts for aliexpress resellers.
AnonC 6y ago
> Creating a Facebook Shop is free and simple. That’s just PR speak. The truth, as it will be realized soon (if not suspected already), is that this will not be free. It will take away the freedom of the businesses and hold them to ransom for Facebook’s own benefit. Neither will it be simple to move out when the realization hits. It’s a trap, IMNSHO!
- chaoticmass 6y ago
  I wonder how they will handle returns and such like when you sell on eBay or Amazon. eBay started out as simply a middleman who helped bring buyers to sellers, and then stepped out of the way. When bad sellers started scamming people too much and eBay started to get a bad reputation, they imposed very strict rules that made sellers lives much more difficult, even the honest ones. The PR speak says it will be simple. Sure. If your customer satisfaction metrics drop below 99.99999998% you lose your business. Simple!
- petre 6y ago
  Of course it's free, you only have to agree to relinpquish your soul by clicking this button.
- chillacy 6y ago
  Game theory would suggest that even if all individual business participants know this, they will still opt to sign up anyways because they're making locally optimum decisions. The paradox of advertising is well known as well, yet ad spend continues to go up. Unfortunately there aren't many solutions to the dilemma, there's always the illusion of choice but the reality ends up being coercive nonetheless.
  - AnonC 6y ago
    Could you suggest some reading material on this please?
JamesCoffeeman 6y ago
Facebook introduces Etsy.
destitude 6y ago
I already have enough trouble with businesses that think Facebook is the internet. I wonder how many customers businesses lose by only engaging with Facebook users?
- Kye 6y ago
  Not many. Most of their customers also think Facebook is the internet.
codegladiator 6y ago
Brace yourself for the tide of MLM FB shops
- rozap 6y ago
  Yikes, Facebook is the perfect petri dish for these sorts of things to take off.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- texascloud 6y ago
  What is MLM?
  - codegladiator 6y ago
    multi level marketing aka pyramid schemes
  - benmarks 6y ago
    Multi-Level Marketing, e.g. that person from grade school who messages you out of the blue to ask how you're doing, and then tell you how much better you'd be doing with daily injections of IsoLeanIonigenTonicWater which you will also want to sell once you feel amazing/thin/virle/whatever.
    - davidajackson 6y ago
      I used to program in a co-working space for fun where the company next to me was trying to build one of those schemes with some sort of ionized water. The CEO was perpetually convinced that if he "just got 400,000$ in funding" everything was going to be great. All the employees seemed to hate it there. Was pretty annoying to listen to, but not as annoying as the guy a few cubicles away who was trying to sell gold.
      - 6y ago
AzzieElbab 6y ago
how are those going to magically just-work without logistics and conflict resolution?
- tomcooks 6y ago
  (unfortunately) worked pretty well for amazon, and the concerns were the same
  - kevindeasis 6y ago
    what do you mean? isn't the logistics and conflict resolution of amazon, pretty much best-in-class?
  - AzzieElbab 6y ago
    As one of the first Amazon customers I strongly disagree
- LunaSea 6y ago
  Could you explain what you mean by conflict resolution? Do you mean payment chargebacks, refunds and fraud tickets?
tomcooks 6y ago
Finally some honesty, good riddance to feel good nonsense about persons, being connected and the like - it's all about the money.
bovermyer 6y ago
If Facebook Shops allows you to sell digital products like PDFs, then it very much has my attention.
- type0 6y ago
  I really hope they don't poison that market as well.
  - bovermyer 6y ago
    Well, to be fair, there are digital product marketplaces that are still essentially monopolies (DriveThru, Kindle). I doubt Facebook is going to take over those markets any time soon.
- PhilipA 6y ago
  What products are there currently for doing this beside Gumroad?
  - bovermyer 6y ago
    DriveThruRPG and its sister sites are the ones that stand out to me. But I operate in the tabletop RPG industry, which is fairly niche.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
koolba 6y ago
This is long overdue. I bet they’re working on a PayPal competitor and eventually their own in-house data driven credit system. If you think you were being tracked across every mouse hover and scroll now, imagine what it’ll look like when there’s this much on the line.
- RosanaAnaDana 6y ago
  Zuckbucks. FB going to start its own federal reserve.
  - koolba 6y ago
    I was thinking “Facebacks”, but yes that’s the singularity.
    - bravoetch 6y ago
      Facebuuks
- caogecym 6y ago
  This new offering feels a natural outcome now that the core product (fb.com, Messenger) user base starts to saturate. Previously they could just focus on international expansion on existing product, now the approach needs to shift. And that might be the reason why FB has so little in house built products v.s. products via acquisition, compared to Google. So there's a growth pressure across the company's structure chain. From this point on, it would be interesting to see what other products FB would launch to leverage their huge social network. My 5 dollar bet would be cloud infra that compete with AWS and Azure - the selling point would be, hey join FB Cloud Infra and we'll help you reach 2 billion FB users!
- richardbrevig 6y ago
  > I bet they're working on a PayPal competitor... They've allowed money transfer through Messenger for sometime now. The UX is probably the best I've had. I prefer sending money that way because it's through the debit card (easy set up), free, and instant.
saltedonion 6y ago
I don’t see this as a positive for FB at all. To me, this looks like FB has finally accepted defeat in the social networking space. Over the years it has been deteriorating at delivering on its core mission of connecting people and supporting personal relationships. I don’t think FB of the past would have green lighted this project, the hit on its brand positioning is significant. It will only accelerate people’s disassociation between FB and a social network. Effectively, at this point they’re just cashing in on their brand equity and milking their user base. They’ll pay in terms of churn and decreased LTV.
- hckr_news 6y ago
  It considers itself a media conglomerate and has done for some time now. Social connections is just one piece of what they offer.
  - saltedonion 6y ago
    FB as in Facebook, excluding Instagram, which has traditionally been positioned as more of a open platform of discovery.
- carlinmack 6y ago
  Do you know about Facebook Watch, their streaming service with real original TV shows? Their switch from 'just' a social network was years and years ago
  - saltedonion 6y ago
    Didn’t know they had original TV shows, but I thought at least they will build social features into Watch. Shopping on the other hand, is a private and individualistic activity. I feel this is far removed from their core mission.
    - chillacy 6y ago
      > is a private and individualistic activity Some people go to malls as a social activity. Others like to read product reviews by people (sometimes well known bloggers), or watch youtube videos. Sometimes people even ask their friends for product recommendations. Shopping is to some a very social thing.
hckr_news 6y ago
How can developers leverage Facebook/Insta shops for business opportunities?
alexashka 6y ago
The more low hanging fruit these companies pluck, the more obvious it becomes how much of the internet wants to be connected to real identities. Facebook is largely a real person <-> online person connector and a very crude version of everyday items such as photographs, calendars, small shops, etc. Except computers lift the constraint of copying being expensive in the real world, while the internet lifts the constraint of copied object being expensive and slow to move around. While Amazon provides inventory and delivery infrastructure to businesses and an internet storefront for customers, Facebook hardly provides anything that isn't trivial to copy - they rely solely on network effects and as a result - can largely be seen as a middleman parasite, worthy of extermination.
buboard 6y ago
Hm, unlike classifieds, shopping is not a social activity, in fact most ppl would not like their friends to know what they re purchasing. And the shops would need to either duplicate inventory or lock it in facebook. They 've tried this before, and failed https://mashable.com/2012/02/21/facebook-brands-closing-stores-fcommerce/?europe=true https://mashable.com/2012/02/21/facebook-brands-closing-stor... I don't think it will be better this time
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  > in fact most ppl would not like their friends to know what they re purchasing Not true by my experience. In fact, lots of people go shopping together. Sure, some stuff is private. But most clothes, electronics, computer games, household, furniture etc etc is stuff people buy and share around all the time.
mrkramer 6y ago
Crucial information from Shopify: "Merchants will get control over customization and merchandising for their storefronts inside Facebook and Instagram, while managing their products, inventory, orders, and fulfillment directly from within Shopify." "Consumers will be able to easily find, browse, and buy products through a purpose-built, immersive experience in these apps they use every day. Checkout will be powered by Shopify for merchants, with Shopify also offering Instagram Checkout to select merchants testing the new feature." Facebook wants to capture all discovery through FB and Insta directly competing with Amazon and Google Shopping.
- saltedonion 6y ago
  Discovery is where the money is at. If FB can dominate discovery they will effectively commoditize the product listing, inventory management layer.
  - rad_gruchalski 6y ago
    Meh. People who don’t use facebook can’t discover anything. I know many who removed their facebook account and are not going back. That’s not to say there aren’t many on facebook who will use this.
- skybrian 6y ago
  It seems like you want to sell through multiple channels without being too dependent on any one of them? This could be a very good channel for some early adopters, but then the economics of it could change pretty quickly.
- moneywoes 6y ago
  Don't they also have a checkout platform coming in the future? Wouldn't that be a good Shopify competitor.
- tjbiddle 6y ago
  There's been a Shopify->Facebook/Instagram integration for ages. Personally, I found it to be pretty garbage - but I'm sure they've gained a ton of data while running it. Facebook Shop just sounds like the next evolution of this.
milin 6y ago
What does this mean for Squarespace and companies alike who strive to make shopping experiences for small and medium businesses?
MadafakinBATMAN 6y ago
Is it just me or was that the most hippy non-value product ever? Like printing with antique printing press seems as mumbo jumbo as gwyneth paltrow's selling stones to me
TheLastMan 6y ago
I don't need to bother reading dystopian sci-fi anymore, it's all happening around me.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  One of the frightening things is when you notice that, as society becomes more dystopian (e.g. more totalitarian, more extremely unequal in the division of wealth etc.), there doesn't develop the strong awareness that it _is_ dystopian. It that the sense of what's normal and acceptable degrades. At best you get this weak sense of a general malaise.
  - Kiro 6y ago
    So either people are clueless sheep that don't know better or they simply don't care. The first seems pretty patronizing to me and the latter means we are in minority with our definition of dystopia.
    - einpoklum 6y ago
      I think neither is true. It's just that people adjust and much of their - our - norms and expectations are socially constructed. And it's difficult to imagine a society conducting itself differently when you haven't lived in it.
    - jchook 6y ago
      Feeling powerless forces us to recalculate our tare weight.
    - 72deluxe 6y ago
      I think they just don't care. I had a look at Marx's ideas of people being in a certain class and engaging in a class struggle, rising up. But it didn't happen because people are mostly just selfish. They don't care if they're in a certain "class", they don't care if they're being sold to, they generally don't care if they're being tracked. They just care about being able to do what they want to do. As long as it doesn't interfere with their life too much (or even if it does, if there's no alternative), they don't do anything about it. And with the modern population, as long as it is extremely easy they will do it. I am not sure if this is good or bad, or just an inherent part of human nature.
treebornfrog 6y ago
This is a very smart move. Zuck proving he's the best allocator of capital in the consumer Internet space once again. Im not in the HN bubble so much, I did delete for a few years. Recently installed it to get on a few silver bullion trading groups as there is a shortage and boy are those groups super valuable for buying and selling.
saadalem 6y ago
Small businesses operated either individually or by less than 10 people. A bunch of customers buy products/services from these businesses. So they need a better way to: Engage with their customers Sell and manage product/service deliveries Target specific customer audience Show products/services availability Whatsapp could be the right solution not facebook apps. Also a combination of Yelp and Facebook/Whatsapp could lead replacing small business websites(I'm not telling that no smb website should exist) that going to make a fortune. The platform needs to accomplish these three things : The ability to list core info like contact details, hours of operation, and service offerings in a minimalist fashion. The ability to solicit feedback (not ratings) from customers in a low-friction, high-upside way. An ad system that let's a 60 year-old luddite set up a campaign in less than 3 minutes without having to call anyone. There's a lot to tell but I'll leave you with these thoughts.
- askafriend 6y ago
  Good post. I really think a lot of people here either haven't run a small/medium business or are woefully out of touch with the needs of the people that run these kinds of businesses. Your post helps ground and frame the discussion appropriately.
  - FriendlyNormie 6y ago
    Thanks for sucking up to the other commenter in this totally organic exchange between two people who definitely aren’t Facebook employees.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- dmode 6y ago
  This is a great post. But the biggest opportunity here is to build an aggregate SMB platform to take on Amazon. In my local downtown, I see a ton of mom and pop stores, but they don’t get a ton of foot traffic. I sometimes imagine unlocking their inventory that can allow for some inherent advantages like same day pick-up and supporting local businesses
champagnepapi 6y ago
Does this work for subscription based businesses?
rbarnes01 6y ago
Interesting that their preview doesn't show any stars/reviews. I wonder if they will add this feature in the future?
TYPE_FASTER 6y ago
Uber buys GrubHub, Facebook creates a Facebook Shop vertical for restaurants and food. Most places have a Facebook page anyway.
einpoklum 6y ago
I just wish we could read on HN tomorrow: "Introducing Antitrust action against Facebook (justice.gov)"
- jedberg 6y ago
  That's not likely to happen under this President unless MZ says something nasty about him. Otherwise you'll probably have to wait until the next admin at least.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    This is likely to happen neither under a Biden administration nor under a Trump one.
- ikeyany 6y ago
  Elizabeth Warren's campaign focused on tempering the powers of Facebook and other tech giants. However her campaign failed to gain serious traction, for various reasons.
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    > Elizabeth Warren's campaign focused on tempering the powers of Facebook and other tech giants While she made that point, I would say that was more rhetoric than serious intent. That's not only because of Ms. Warren's strong party-establishment loyalties, but more significantly because of her stated intent and practice of being financed by large pro-corporate donors (albeit not Facebook) and her disinterest in combating the political influence of the tech giants on the donation-recipient side.
aboringusername 6y ago
To me, it seems like these tech giants want the internet to start and end with their platforms. Facebook is becoming (or has become) people's experience of the "internet", it has a lot of what people want. My concern is there isn't yet a law or enforced guidelines (similar to the GDPR) about machine learning, and what happens when it gets things wrong. Recently, we've seen with a postcast app and pushbullet being threatened on Google. What happens if an AI or system decides it no longer likes your shop, or factors outside your control cause it to be flagged? A commenter worried about MLM's, which is a valid point. Will we know the identity of the FB user who made the shop? How does the ownership process works? (I.E who actually "owns" the FB shop on FB and get admin controls). I refuse to engage with and use FB, it may be that some shops become entirely FB oriented and forget "mycoolshop.com", because FB provides all the tools a business owner needs. Sad, but slowly we're seeing the death of the internet we all wanted and possibly knew for a time in the early part of the century.
amelius 6y ago
Another BigCorp trying to put a gate around an existing market, this time it's retail. Yuck.
- riazrizvi 6y ago
  "Is your store doing well? Have you expanded to a couple of other locations successfully? Is it time for you to create a broader franchise? ... Don't worry, we've been watching, and we already made this information available to big stores in your area who were willing to pay for the privilege. That's why Big-store-chain is already negotiating a better contract with your supply chain. I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted. Thank you for your business." - American Edge. It's our edge, not yours.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Traster 6y ago
That advert is an incredibly tone deaf advert. Support the little guy! Yes, support little Mark Zuckerberg and his sole control of a $600Bn company. Has it ever occured to anyone in a multi billion dollar corporation that maybe it doesn't come across well to pretend you're fighting for the little guy. Why not take a break for once and just say "Hey, we're fucking enormous, no one even browses the web anymore, they browse facebook, so we've deigned to give you the smallest sliver of access to our amazing hoard of treasure - customers (in exchange for 90% of your profits)". At least it would be honest.
- creddit 6y ago
  As always, when you’re everyone’s favorite punching bag: damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Would love to know how you got to them taking 90% of the profits. Are they even charging commissions or is this a scheme to drive more ads purchases?
  - Traster 6y ago
    I love it, spend a decade engaging in scummy behaviour, and then have people completely ignore that and claim that you're just a punching bag. Do you know how you become the everyone's favourite punching bag? Stand by and watch whilst people use your platform to commit genocide, and then tell everyone you're looking out for the little guy. Damned if you do enable a genocide, damned if you... oh no, just the first one.
    - creddit 6y ago
      This would be a great rebuttal to someone who said “I like that Facebook helps people kill people” but is a pretty weak rebuttal to someone calling out you making up fee structures for the product and your silly moralizing over a company launching... checks notes... a way for people to sell things on the internet. The horror.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
sub7 6y ago
lol FB trying to fuck over 3rd party sellers and Amazon is like go ahead chumps we've been at this for decades. Seriously though who the hell trusts FB. Nobody. They should fold.
- dylkil 6y ago
  >Seriously though who the hell trusts FB. Nobody. 2.6 billion monthly active users beg to differ
  - sub7 6y ago
    I'm one of them. But the graph is going down and engagement is going down faster, hence the frantic acquisition of anything else that gains traction - IG, WA etc. Tiktok won't sell and their curve is convex so let's see what happens in the next couple years.
swiley 6y ago
Yes tie yourself to a large platform that can and will shut you down for political/social reasons. Or just stick a paypal button on a static site.
- fsociety 6y ago
  Yep that worked well for Wikileaks
  - Tepix 6y ago
    Yep, Wikileaks is still around. Their store is at https://wikileaks.shop/ https://wikileaks.shop/ or https://eu.wikileaks.shop/ https://eu.wikileaks.shop/
CosmicShadow 6y ago
As someone with an Etsy shop this got me excited for a second, but unless I missed something, this is just some sort of link from your FB Page to some integrated shop? We use Etsy because we get all these sales from people using it to search for stuff, but I guess if we only have 80 people and spend no money on FB ads or trying to grow our page, this is essentially completely useless as we already have links to our shop... We were hoping this was some sort of shop built into marketplace that was curated or searchable or something, since we've had some success selling on there, but it's a complete garbage pile and dealing with people is awful and doesn't scale very fast. People flake out like crazy, no way to manage messages well or anything. Missed opportunity. Maybe for Instagram, having a shop built into your profile could be awesome instead of saying, "link in profile" then having your user search for the product they say starting at your site homepage.
- codecamper 6y ago
  If you make a shop on FB Shops, please know that you do not need Shopify to do that. Shopify provides no benefit and charges you per transaction.
pot8n 6y ago
>Introducing Facebook Shops: Helpi... stopped reading right there. I can't stand the FB bullshit anymore.
youareostriches 6y ago
Facebook needs to be broken up immediately, and their core platform offering replaced by an open protocol.
- holler 6y ago
  why open protocol and not help other competitors gain market share?
yalogin 6y ago
What took it so long for FB to do this? This is honestly one of the first things they should have done.
- Mengkudulangsat 6y ago
  They are waiting for Libra.
mnehring 6y ago
Has anyone seen anything specifically mentioned about an API? I did a quick search and didn't see anything mentioned, but if they integrated with 3rd party tools, either they have an API or they already programmed a feed scraping tool of some sort. I suppose if there is an API, but they haven't released public documentation, it might be possible to find out details about many of the endpoint from WooCommerce's code.
- busymom0 6y ago
  As someone who’s been burnt by using their IG API before when they decided to shut it down out of nowhere, I won’t trust their API for this.
  - mnehring 6y ago
    For my personal selling, I wouldn't trust the API's:-). However, I have a product that helps a particular retail vertical list their items for sale online. I imagine my clients wouldn't mind having their items automatically cross-posted to Facebook's shop as well. (So, if Facebook kills the API, it would kill a feature in my product, but not my whole product.) That's why I was wondering about the API. I'll probably need to do some reading and searching today when I get some time!
pramit 6y ago
Truho.com
NicoJuicy 6y ago
And using the big E-commerce platforms. Reducing opportunity for a software developer with his own platform to connect to it, what is basically just a product feed + order confirmation endpoint. And more useless noice on Facebook of everyone promoting their take-away. Ugh Ps. I buy local, the take-aways across the street. Not the 30 places from my old hometown.
Thorentis 6y ago
It's fascinating to see these tech giants fight each other for control over the Internet empire. Eventually I think we will see 1 by 1 they will fall, and a couple will remain. This is Facebook's attempt to take on Amazon and Google both at once, and given their huge user base and method of engagement, they may just have a shot at it. I can see it now. Scroll Instagram to see photos of your friends wearing new clothes, "like" the photo. Get an ad the next day for that same product now available from a Facebook Shop for 40% off. Use your Facebook Credits to buy it.
- gitgud 6y ago
  They might also implement object detection within photos and match things in the photo to products you could buy... on Facebook...
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Google could do this with Chrome... They already have the "right click, search google for things looking like this image". All they'd need to do is make the UI more discoverable and make the search results include products, and they'd be $1B up on revenue...
    - woodrowbarlow 6y ago
      i don't think the "search by image" tool is doing as much computer vision as you think it is -- it seems to mostly match shapes and colors.
  - AndrewKemendo 6y ago
    That is a core selling feature of Shops: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2686633214905269 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2686633214905269
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- draw_down 6y ago
tams 6y ago
In the light of this, it's much more obvious why they stared exposing the Facebook brand in their Instagram and WhatsApp properties.
_448 6y ago
Looks like a challenge to Amazon minus the warehouses!
stevespang 6y ago
I would NEVER get involved in anything Zuckerberg and his ilk create, trying to monopolize the world. Shopify will always be 10x better.
kull 6y ago
Any idea how to apply for the early access to this api?
bitL 6y ago
Some time ago I was thinking what would it take to bring down Facebook and one of the ideas was for social platform to allow direct sales for hobbyists/small shops. They managed to patch this vulnerability now.
rodolphoarruda 6y ago
Another nail in the decentralized web coffin. The big steam machine is working at full power.
kumarvvr 6y ago
Shopify will be the loser here. FB will use them, chew and spit them out. FB only wants shopify now because it has all the data, inventory, categorization, etc. The next logical move would be to buy a company like wix, then target smb with their sales and marketing team to help them make digital storefronts on FB, integrate with their social platform and then ditch shopify. Edit : Also, there is no way to tell if your competitor is paying to get your data and costomer info. This will lead to an overall weakening of the mom and pop store operations, where they are disrupted ever more easily by the competition.
- ta17711771 6y ago
  True. Square bought Weebly for this.
WrongThinkerNo5 6y ago
I still remember that time when Zuck publicly admitted that he was aiming for Facebook to replace the internet, which was clearly promptly scrubbed from the internet (it is one of those regrets that I did not save the video even though I realized it was important, while not realizing we actually had memoryholes already). It seems more than ever that he is well on the way to doing so, as it becomes ever less likely that any kind of relief or resolution will come from captured regulators, let alone captured and bought off legislators. Pretty soon, real competition will be dead, it has little life left in it as is.
dadarepublic 6y ago
Tangentially related: >'GrokNet', the AI behind Facebook Shops, looks for body type, skin tone, location, socioeconomic class in photos https://boingboing.net/2020/05/20/groknet-the-ai-behind-fac.html https://boingboing.net/2020/05/20/groknet-the-ai-behind-fac.... Is there good reason to be concerned on this level?
ta17711771 6y ago
FTC is asleep at the wheel, with Facebook. Did you know they're doing dating, gamestreaming, classified ads....list goes on longer than my patience.
rakoo 6y ago
The WeChat-ification of FB is going forward. There is still so much to do, but I for one am happy that total control over society's interaction by a single company is slowly coming over to the Western world. (For reference if you don't have wechat or alipay in China, you might as well live as an hermit because fewer and fewer places will accomodate you)
sarfrazarshad 6y ago
Facebook has had the shop option for quite some time now on the Facebook pages. I have used it, it really sucked. What's new here? Checkout option? The Instagram shop is new that's for sure. But I am not sure how that will perform.
- sarfrazarshad 6y ago
  Discovery was a real issue. I hope they have improved it now

432 points by davidbarker 6y ago

"We’re also working more closely with partners like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce..." Is Facebook Shops not a direct competitor to Shopify? Or is this just "embrace, extend, and extinguish"?

Scoundreller 6y ago
I wonder if slashdot has a Borg avatar for Zuck yet...
- r00fus 6y ago
  No props/photoshop needed.
  - bfung 6y ago
    Savage.
- arthurcolle 6y ago
  This image works pretty well: https://i.imgflip.com/288d4p.jpg https://i.imgflip.com/288d4p.jpg
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    Looks like slashdot beta may not do avatars. Fuck slashdot bêta.
nickff 6y ago
My guess is that they will try to integrate Shopify sites into the platform, to give the FB Shops platform some momentum, then gradually push the non FBS stores down the page. My reasoning is that they are emulating Google. Alternatively, they could be looking to make FB Shops an advertising platform, similar to Amazon Seller Central, where they don't care who you buy from, but they want each seller to pay for ads and/or payment processing.
- basch 6y ago
  Although being a simple shopify drop in replacement would have its advantages in simplicity, there is probably more long term potential if they embrace multi-channel sales, and become a storefront management tool ala https://www.ecomdash.com/ https://www.ecomdash.com/ and https://www.shipstation.com/ https://www.shipstation.com/ Some people are going to keep shopping on amazon, some on ebay, some on walmart, some on etsy, some directly on websites. Im not saying that's what they are doing, but its a way to skim off all transactions instead of trying to force business into facebook.
  - nerfhammer 6y ago
    Probably the right answer. If you have a shop that's getting some sales on etsy, amazon or ebay or wherever else you're not going to want to close it down in favor of facebook – you'll just open a second storefront there.
- gowld 6y ago
  Amazon cares who you buy from. Amazon Basics pushes out sellers.
  - type0 6y ago
    Not just Basics, they have so many other brands of their own that most customers will never even know that.
- codecamper 6y ago
  Your guess appears to be wrong. I couldn't find anything about FB Shops using Shopify platform. Only that you can stock your store from the Shopify store.. which is a tool that Shopify provides. In other words, Shopify is using the FB Merchant and Store APIs. Like anyone can. It seems like a bad deal for Shopify sellers. They must pay FB 5% and Shopify 2% of each transaction. If they jettisoned Shopify, they'd just pay FB 5%.
xoxoy 6y ago
Both partner and potential competitor? Depends how serious FB wants to invest in building out their own e-commerce backend platform. Not sure it is that valuable to them when IG is the more differentiating part of the product.
- jklein11 6y ago
  Why not just fork Magento? I bet with Facebook's infrastructure you could get it running at Shopify scale for a few million bucks a year.
jameslk 6y ago
For a lot of stores, Shopify is just an API for your store. There's a big trend in ecommerce of going "headless" and using Shopify's API to push your products out to many channels. In that sense, Shopify is merely a special database (similar to Salesforce) to track your customers, orders, products, inventory, discounts, etc which is then pushed out to channels like Facebook Shop or Amazon.
- machbio 6y ago
  Yes, its interesting shopify have a product called Lite (https://www.shopify.com/lite https://www.shopify.com/lite) which does not have any UI
  - codecamper 6y ago
    Nothing lite about the payment terms. You pay them over a 100 a year plus part of every transaction. For keeping a database of photos and descriptions & integrating with APIs? Doesn't that seem overpriced?
- fossuser 6y ago
  Interesting - sounds like gumroad? https://gumroad.com/ https://gumroad.com/
- codecamper 6y ago
  Shopify seems to overcharge for that sort of functionality. Merchants are paying Shopify per transaction while customers shop on another site & pay using Google Pay, Paypal, FB Pay, or Apple Pay.
mrkramer 6y ago
I don't get it. If you buy something from Facebook Shop does Facebook take a fee or Shopify for example. I'm guessing Facebook is trying to get rid off websites and essentially Google and hoping all discovery happens on Facebook and Instagram. I'm wondering how Facebook Shops is going to impact Shopify,Amazon and Google Shopping in the long term.
- PhilipA 6y ago
  They will probably do it for free, and then just limit visibility unless you pay to advertise the products.
- codecamper 6y ago
  Facebook is going to handle everything (search, display, cart, checkout, payments) and will charge 5%. Shopify is doing nothing on a transaction level & yet they have a stock that requires growth, so they are charging 2% per transaction. I kid you not.
ksec 6y ago
I read the tweet from Shopify CEO and I thought Facebook went and partnered with Shopify only. Turns out that is not true. Anyway out of all those listed, I would think Shopify has the biggest to gain. While I dont know enough about the possibility of Facebook doing Triple E, at least All of a sudden Shopify's insane valuation makes a little more sense and justifying the possible potential. Currently market cap at ˜90B and trading at ˜50x revenue.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  Wow, I haven't been following Shopify, but their stock is going gangbusters. A mid level employee who joined around their IPO, with ~$300k of stock vesting over four years would be worth almost $18MM today. Wow.
  - codecamper 6y ago
    Just thank J Powell and Trump.
- codecamper 6y ago
  Not really. Shopify is only using FB's merchant APIs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/commerce-platform/ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/commerce-platform/ And that's it. They are allowing Shopify merchants to publish their inventories to the FB store. In exchange Shopify wants 2% of every transaction and 30 bucks a month or 9 bucks for their "lite" version. Or you can just use FB directly to stock your store & pay Shopify zilch.
kamilszybalski 6y ago
It's a really interesting question. My gut tells me that Shopify is looking for a suitor and this is facebook's way of de-risking (validating?) a potential investment.
- boringg 6y ago
  Shopify is definitely not looking for a suitor - no way. They still have so much growth potential - that rocketship is looking to add more channels. Once on Shopify it's tough to leave - that whole switching cost.
- blahbhthrow3748 6y ago
  A lot of Shopify's competitive advantage comes from being a giant, Canadian tech company. Similar to Blackberry before it, the government is extremely generous and investors price the stock accordingly. If Shopify moved to the States or was acquired by an American company I think it would take away that unique appeal. Also the founder is an egomaniac and would never sell.
paxys 6y ago
Nowadays it's more "embrace, extend, and acquire"

furtive808 6y ago

Is it US only?

rnotaro 6y ago
US Only and selected shops for now.

_jal 6y ago

A whole class of retailer that will be blocked at my router. The Balkanization is well underway.

itsspring 6y ago
My thoughts exactly. I’ve blocked Facebook in my DNS hosts file & thankfully Firefox has a Facebook fence to isolate their trackers.
- swagonomixxx 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, has doing this disrupted your web browsing experience in any way? I'd like to do this but I'm kind of afraid of alienating 75% of the web that relies on the FB JS SDK for something (I'm not really sure if this is the case, but it might be?) EDIT: thanks for the responses. Will block at DNS :)
  - executive 6y ago
    no problems blocking FB JS.
  - yepthatsreality 6y ago
    The only problems I could see is that some services that ONLY auth via Facebook will not work. Having stated that, consider if you eliminate Facebook from your life and have issues on the web, and the answer to those issues is not "create a Facebook account" then it should be relatively safe to remove Facebook from your life.
    - swagonomixxx 6y ago
      Yep, I've already deleted my FB account since like 2014 but I know that a lot of sites load their SDK in order to track still. Thanks.
  - mikestew 6y ago
    By "disrupt", do you mean "improves immensely"? It depends on how much FOMO you suffer from. For instance, the folks that I used to do music jams with (picture middle-aged folk playing bluegrass) have moved to FB Live(?) for some things. I don't see those, nor participate. That's okay, we do our own non-proprietary chat once a week in lieu of live jammin'. Local animal shelter posts stuff on FB, most of which I can live without. Does shit break because something, something FB SDK? Nope, at least not shit I care about, and not FB. But for the most part, I get to mostly forget that FB even exists.

suyash 6y ago

Why have 2 different shops on Facebook and Instagram, it will lead to more confusion. Also what about for folks who don't use either of those services?

kixiQu 6y ago
What, all 12 of them? More seriously, I don't think they're requiring exclusivity.
derefr 6y ago
Plenty of brands were already doing lead-gen to their products through Instagram, whether through ads, or just by creating a photo/video of their product that started trending (in a way similar to how you'd expect a pretty craftwork to trend on Pinterest.) I think Instagram even already has the inline "purchase the thing this is a picture of" flow—though right now it's just in the form of a modal webview to the partner's shop product page for the relevant item. The "Instagram Shop" part of the offering they're describing, sounds less like an independent system, and more like a way for independent creators to get the same benefits as those large partners, where they can take a picture of the fancy sweater they made, have it appear on trending, and then there can be a "Buy" button right there on the post everyone's sharing. It's an Instagram integration for the Facebook Shop system. I also don't think there's going to be a separate "Instagram Shop" landing page for a given account, per se; if there is an index view, it'll just be a collection of the buyable items posted by a given Instagram account. The expectation, though, would be that "buyable" posts would just be part of a brand page's regular feed of posts. The "buy button" is just an enhancement to what the account was already doing, rather than a whole separate storefront to set up. I'm guessing, in the end, what you'd really be purchasing via the Instagram hosted inline purchase flow, is a Facebook Shop product SKU. You'd probably get an email from Facebook Shopping about your product, etc. In other words, "Facebook Shop" would be a payment processor / hosted commerce backend, that happens to have a flagship front-end UX; and Instagram would be an alternative front-end UX. > Also what about for folks who don't use either of those services? Given the way they seem to be building it, there's definitely some backend core with an API that looks a lot like Shopify's API. I'm guessing they'll offer third-party developer access to that API.
6y ago

foobar_ 6y ago

It's interesting how people here are happy to criticise "chyna" when facebook is really the same thing with a corporate logo and a backdoor. The difference is china has a frontdoor. Facebook also runs in your phone with spyware.

alharith 6y ago
Let's just say you are correct, framing and all. So the two options in your scenario are collecting data without consent. The difference then becomes feeding information to a US corporation, which benefits 25,000+ US citizens through direct employment, benefits the countless stock portfolios that hold facebook stock, and benefits the US tech business as a whole, or a brutalist authoritarian regime, hostile to US interests that murders it's own citizens. Both are wrong and need correction, but I'll take facebook's "spyware" any day.
ancarda 6y ago
This thread seems mostly negative towards Facebook (good - fuck em') but your comment seems to suggest you think there's some bias here. Are people on HN being too positive about Facebook?
- foobar_ 6y ago
  Maybe its just me but I have noticed a sharp rise in anti-china rhetoric here. For example there is a dead comment below which cites America is not a totalitarian regime that hurts its citizens, which is not true because you have Native Americans and racism in America which affects plenty of minorities. As a programmer one of our tasks is to build abstractions and simplifications. To me it looks like facebook has a near monopoly on a social network that collects and sells data and China has one big social network, that has everyone on it. From a strictly interface perspective both are the same. Both have backdoors. What I find troubling is that people seem to accept Facebook as a hero when you could as well make the case the china is more heroic for its people. It was china the pulled a majority of people out of poverty not U.S.A which has a lot of homeless people. Capitalism with monopolies that sleep with the government is not that different from chinese style capitalism, which on paper has to serve the people. The biggest problem with capitalism is the "legal person" definition and limited liability exception. Offshoring is also a shit idea clearly. Talking about china is relevant for hackers because probably china might be more sincere about open source than microsoft with its profit motive. Anti-china rhetoric will just ruin such discussions rather than allow people to get balanced perspectives.

flyGuyOnTheSly 6y ago

Instagram shop charges 5%+ transaction fees... (more if the product is priced below $8) is this going to be the same pricing model? Because if so it's a non-starter for myself and anyone comfortable with the stripe api and/or shopify at least.

lykahb 6y ago

The main source of revenue for FB is advertising. They are able to offer Facebook Shops at a loss to get the market share. Many small businesses are mainly present online as a shop on a platform and a FB page. This is bad news for Etsy.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago

I dislike Facebook, but this is a really smart way to grab a market share. Most businesses need minimal online presence so FB front is sufficient. I won't see those businesses, but I know I am a minority, when it comes to this.

seph-reed 6y ago
> really smart Maybe effective? Smart implies a bit too much imo. For a while now, users have been using pages to promote their businesses and using FB pay for transactions. It seems this was inevitable, and I'm more surprising how long it took than how "really smart" it is.
- jasonv 6y ago
  I work in banking. Everything we do, that's easier elsewhere, is harder in banking, because it's a bank (regulated, money, etc). Everything Facebook builds has to scale to billions immediately. Could be a contributing factor to why it took them this long to do this.
  - seph-reed 6y ago
    That makes a lot of sense. Does raise the stakes quite a bit too, which makes the decision maybe a little bit difficult. So the engineers who make the thing happen are for sure smart. And the researchers who prove it should be profitable are also pretty smart. But the idea itself -- trying to take over some other market that they already have a foothold in -- is pretty obvious.
  - cameronbrown 6y ago
    Why would it? They can do controlled rollouts if they want. Core design has to scale, but I seriously doubt they'd be planning for millions/QPS right out the gate.
scarface74 6y ago
Random non rant: Thank you for being self aware enough to know that you are in the minority when it comes to not having Facebook. Most posts by people who don’t use FB and post to HN feign ignorance and say something like “I haven’t used FB in 10 years. Does anyone still use it?”

draw_down 6y ago

To get started with, or to run a really simple small business, probably not a bad idea. But a real business should think hard about depending on this.

dzonga 6y ago

FB, just came with a bang. with how prevalent fb is internationally. they can capture majority of the market share. sad day, for open solutions like woocommerce. & if FB had managed to get libra, off the ground, then they would be transacting more amounts of currency than anyone in the world. I won't put Shopify in the discussion, as they are only available in select 1st world countries.

ibdf 6y ago
Woocommerce fails to deliver a product that doesn't require a developer and or thousands in add-ons. It works for a very basic shop but after that you will need to hire a developer.
- Kye 6y ago
  It's $45/month from the company behind WordPress for the majority of companies that don't need that level of customization. Past that, it's probably still cheaper than rolling your own solution or doing a panicked migration off Facebook Shops when they start closing the doors.

swagonomixxx 6y ago

With the rise of services like Shopify, Etsy, etc. why are independent product manufacturers in the US / Europe still using Amazon? Is it the lack of the supply chain / item delivery that Amazon provides so well or is it something else? Hearing about how Amazon undercuts pretty much every seller on their system makes me think that sellers would be willing to jump in a heartbeat if given a viable alternative. Facebook Shops seems like a Shopify clone to me ... but I'm not sure as I haven't really used Shopify (and I keep mistaking it for Spotify).

dmalik 6y ago
It's backed by 3rd parties. https://news.shopify.com/shopify-partners-with-facebook-to-help-businesses-launch-branded-facebook-shops https://news.shopify.com/shopify-partners-with-facebook-to-h...
somebrody 6y ago
> why are independent product manufacturers in the US / Europe still using Amazon? They do it to sell to people that are shopping on Amazon in spite of every problem with it. Never being undercut by Amazon isn't important to these sellers. Think, "I don't want to live in a world where someone gets undercut by Amazon better than us".
nickff 6y ago
Many potential customers use Amazon as a search tool, as well as a source for (slightly) trustworthy reviews. If you are off Amazon, you miss out on those customers. In addition to that, making your own webstore used to be more complicated and difficult than it is now; platforms like Shopify have really lowered the barrier to market entry.
- swagonomixxx 6y ago
  That's true. Amazon unfortunately has gained way too much market share for someone to forego being a seller on there.
stevekemp 6y ago
Shopify is pretty good, but if you have a small independant shop the hard part is getting visitors. On that basis etsy is better, because it gets a lot of traffic, but I think facebook will be even more popular. I'm a member of a couple of local groups, largely for buying/selling kids clothing/toys. Something like that wouldn't work so well on other platforms - getting cheap stuff locally. Of course etsy has its own problems, with a large number of their shops just being fronts for aliexpress resellers.

AnonC 6y ago

> Creating a Facebook Shop is free and simple. That’s just PR speak. The truth, as it will be realized soon (if not suspected already), is that this will not be free. It will take away the freedom of the businesses and hold them to ransom for Facebook’s own benefit. Neither will it be simple to move out when the realization hits. It’s a trap, IMNSHO!

chaoticmass 6y ago
I wonder how they will handle returns and such like when you sell on eBay or Amazon. eBay started out as simply a middleman who helped bring buyers to sellers, and then stepped out of the way. When bad sellers started scamming people too much and eBay started to get a bad reputation, they imposed very strict rules that made sellers lives much more difficult, even the honest ones. The PR speak says it will be simple. Sure. If your customer satisfaction metrics drop below 99.99999998% you lose your business. Simple!
petre 6y ago
Of course it's free, you only have to agree to relinpquish your soul by clicking this button.
chillacy 6y ago
Game theory would suggest that even if all individual business participants know this, they will still opt to sign up anyways because they're making locally optimum decisions. The paradox of advertising is well known as well, yet ad spend continues to go up. Unfortunately there aren't many solutions to the dilemma, there's always the illusion of choice but the reality ends up being coercive nonetheless.
- AnonC 6y ago
  Could you suggest some reading material on this please?

JamesCoffeeman 6y ago

Facebook introduces Etsy.

destitude 6y ago

I already have enough trouble with businesses that think Facebook is the internet. I wonder how many customers businesses lose by only engaging with Facebook users?

Kye 6y ago
Not many. Most of their customers also think Facebook is the internet.

codegladiator 6y ago

Brace yourself for the tide of MLM FB shops

rozap 6y ago
Yikes, Facebook is the perfect petri dish for these sorts of things to take off.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
texascloud 6y ago
What is MLM?
- codegladiator 6y ago
  multi level marketing aka pyramid schemes
- benmarks 6y ago
  Multi-Level Marketing, e.g. that person from grade school who messages you out of the blue to ask how you're doing, and then tell you how much better you'd be doing with daily injections of IsoLeanIonigenTonicWater which you will also want to sell once you feel amazing/thin/virle/whatever.
  - davidajackson 6y ago
    I used to program in a co-working space for fun where the company next to me was trying to build one of those schemes with some sort of ionized water. The CEO was perpetually convinced that if he "just got 400,000$ in funding" everything was going to be great. All the employees seemed to hate it there. Was pretty annoying to listen to, but not as annoying as the guy a few cubicles away who was trying to sell gold.
    - 6y ago

AzzieElbab 6y ago

how are those going to magically just-work without logistics and conflict resolution?

tomcooks 6y ago
(unfortunately) worked pretty well for amazon, and the concerns were the same
- kevindeasis 6y ago
  what do you mean? isn't the logistics and conflict resolution of amazon, pretty much best-in-class?
- AzzieElbab 6y ago
  As one of the first Amazon customers I strongly disagree
LunaSea 6y ago
Could you explain what you mean by conflict resolution? Do you mean payment chargebacks, refunds and fraud tickets?

tomcooks 6y ago

Finally some honesty, good riddance to feel good nonsense about persons, being connected and the like - it's all about the money.

bovermyer 6y ago

If Facebook Shops allows you to sell digital products like PDFs, then it very much has my attention.

type0 6y ago
I really hope they don't poison that market as well.
- bovermyer 6y ago
  Well, to be fair, there are digital product marketplaces that are still essentially monopolies (DriveThru, Kindle). I doubt Facebook is going to take over those markets any time soon.
PhilipA 6y ago
What products are there currently for doing this beside Gumroad?
- bovermyer 6y ago
  DriveThruRPG and its sister sites are the ones that stand out to me. But I operate in the tabletop RPG industry, which is fairly niche.

deleted 6y ago

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koolba 6y ago

This is long overdue. I bet they’re working on a PayPal competitor and eventually their own in-house data driven credit system. If you think you were being tracked across every mouse hover and scroll now, imagine what it’ll look like when there’s this much on the line.

RosanaAnaDana 6y ago
Zuckbucks. FB going to start its own federal reserve.
- koolba 6y ago
  I was thinking “Facebacks”, but yes that’s the singularity.
  - bravoetch 6y ago
    Facebuuks
caogecym 6y ago
This new offering feels a natural outcome now that the core product (fb.com, Messenger) user base starts to saturate. Previously they could just focus on international expansion on existing product, now the approach needs to shift. And that might be the reason why FB has so little in house built products v.s. products via acquisition, compared to Google. So there's a growth pressure across the company's structure chain. From this point on, it would be interesting to see what other products FB would launch to leverage their huge social network. My 5 dollar bet would be cloud infra that compete with AWS and Azure - the selling point would be, hey join FB Cloud Infra and we'll help you reach 2 billion FB users!
richardbrevig 6y ago
> I bet they're working on a PayPal competitor... They've allowed money transfer through Messenger for sometime now. The UX is probably the best I've had. I prefer sending money that way because it's through the debit card (easy set up), free, and instant.

saltedonion 6y ago

I don’t see this as a positive for FB at all. To me, this looks like FB has finally accepted defeat in the social networking space. Over the years it has been deteriorating at delivering on its core mission of connecting people and supporting personal relationships. I don’t think FB of the past would have green lighted this project, the hit on its brand positioning is significant. It will only accelerate people’s disassociation between FB and a social network. Effectively, at this point they’re just cashing in on their brand equity and milking their user base. They’ll pay in terms of churn and decreased LTV.

hckr_news 6y ago
It considers itself a media conglomerate and has done for some time now. Social connections is just one piece of what they offer.
- saltedonion 6y ago
  FB as in Facebook, excluding Instagram, which has traditionally been positioned as more of a open platform of discovery.
carlinmack 6y ago
Do you know about Facebook Watch, their streaming service with real original TV shows? Their switch from 'just' a social network was years and years ago
- saltedonion 6y ago
  Didn’t know they had original TV shows, but I thought at least they will build social features into Watch. Shopping on the other hand, is a private and individualistic activity. I feel this is far removed from their core mission.
  - chillacy 6y ago
    > is a private and individualistic activity Some people go to malls as a social activity. Others like to read product reviews by people (sometimes well known bloggers), or watch youtube videos. Sometimes people even ask their friends for product recommendations. Shopping is to some a very social thing.

hckr_news 6y ago

How can developers leverage Facebook/Insta shops for business opportunities?

alexashka 6y ago

The more low hanging fruit these companies pluck, the more obvious it becomes how much of the internet wants to be connected to real identities. Facebook is largely a real person <-> online person connector and a very crude version of everyday items such as photographs, calendars, small shops, etc. Except computers lift the constraint of copying being expensive in the real world, while the internet lifts the constraint of copied object being expensive and slow to move around. While Amazon provides inventory and delivery infrastructure to businesses and an internet storefront for customers, Facebook hardly provides anything that isn't trivial to copy - they rely solely on network effects and as a result - can largely be seen as a middleman parasite, worthy of extermination.

buboard 6y ago

Hm, unlike classifieds, shopping is not a social activity, in fact most ppl would not like their friends to know what they re purchasing. And the shops would need to either duplicate inventory or lock it in facebook. They 've tried this before, and failed https://mashable.com/2012/02/21/facebook-brands-closing-stores-fcommerce/?europe=true https://mashable.com/2012/02/21/facebook-brands-closing-stor... I don't think it will be better this time

deleted 6y ago
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joelbluminator 6y ago
> in fact most ppl would not like their friends to know what they re purchasing Not true by my experience. In fact, lots of people go shopping together. Sure, some stuff is private. But most clothes, electronics, computer games, household, furniture etc etc is stuff people buy and share around all the time.

mrkramer 6y ago

Crucial information from Shopify: "Merchants will get control over customization and merchandising for their storefronts inside Facebook and Instagram, while managing their products, inventory, orders, and fulfillment directly from within Shopify." "Consumers will be able to easily find, browse, and buy products through a purpose-built, immersive experience in these apps they use every day. Checkout will be powered by Shopify for merchants, with Shopify also offering Instagram Checkout to select merchants testing the new feature." Facebook wants to capture all discovery through FB and Insta directly competing with Amazon and Google Shopping.

saltedonion 6y ago
Discovery is where the money is at. If FB can dominate discovery they will effectively commoditize the product listing, inventory management layer.
- rad_gruchalski 6y ago
  Meh. People who don’t use facebook can’t discover anything. I know many who removed their facebook account and are not going back. That’s not to say there aren’t many on facebook who will use this.
skybrian 6y ago
It seems like you want to sell through multiple channels without being too dependent on any one of them? This could be a very good channel for some early adopters, but then the economics of it could change pretty quickly.
moneywoes 6y ago
Don't they also have a checkout platform coming in the future? Wouldn't that be a good Shopify competitor.
tjbiddle 6y ago
There's been a Shopify->Facebook/Instagram integration for ages. Personally, I found it to be pretty garbage - but I'm sure they've gained a ton of data while running it. Facebook Shop just sounds like the next evolution of this.

milin 6y ago

What does this mean for Squarespace and companies alike who strive to make shopping experiences for small and medium businesses?

MadafakinBATMAN 6y ago

Is it just me or was that the most hippy non-value product ever? Like printing with antique printing press seems as mumbo jumbo as gwyneth paltrow's selling stones to me

TheLastMan 6y ago

I don't need to bother reading dystopian sci-fi anymore, it's all happening around me.

einpoklum 6y ago
One of the frightening things is when you notice that, as society becomes more dystopian (e.g. more totalitarian, more extremely unequal in the division of wealth etc.), there doesn't develop the strong awareness that it _is_ dystopian. It that the sense of what's normal and acceptable degrades. At best you get this weak sense of a general malaise.
- Kiro 6y ago
  So either people are clueless sheep that don't know better or they simply don't care. The first seems pretty patronizing to me and the latter means we are in minority with our definition of dystopia.
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    I think neither is true. It's just that people adjust and much of their - our - norms and expectations are socially constructed. And it's difficult to imagine a society conducting itself differently when you haven't lived in it.
  - jchook 6y ago
    Feeling powerless forces us to recalculate our tare weight.
  - 72deluxe 6y ago
    I think they just don't care. I had a look at Marx's ideas of people being in a certain class and engaging in a class struggle, rising up. But it didn't happen because people are mostly just selfish. They don't care if they're in a certain "class", they don't care if they're being sold to, they generally don't care if they're being tracked. They just care about being able to do what they want to do. As long as it doesn't interfere with their life too much (or even if it does, if there's no alternative), they don't do anything about it. And with the modern population, as long as it is extremely easy they will do it. I am not sure if this is good or bad, or just an inherent part of human nature.

treebornfrog 6y ago

This is a very smart move. Zuck proving he's the best allocator of capital in the consumer Internet space once again. Im not in the HN bubble so much, I did delete for a few years. Recently installed it to get on a few silver bullion trading groups as there is a shortage and boy are those groups super valuable for buying and selling.

saadalem 6y ago

Small businesses operated either individually or by less than 10 people. A bunch of customers buy products/services from these businesses. So they need a better way to: Engage with their customers Sell and manage product/service deliveries Target specific customer audience Show products/services availability Whatsapp could be the right solution not facebook apps. Also a combination of Yelp and Facebook/Whatsapp could lead replacing small business websites(I'm not telling that no smb website should exist) that going to make a fortune. The platform needs to accomplish these three things : The ability to list core info like contact details, hours of operation, and service offerings in a minimalist fashion. The ability to solicit feedback (not ratings) from customers in a low-friction, high-upside way. An ad system that let's a 60 year-old luddite set up a campaign in less than 3 minutes without having to call anyone. There's a lot to tell but I'll leave you with these thoughts.

askafriend 6y ago
Good post. I really think a lot of people here either haven't run a small/medium business or are woefully out of touch with the needs of the people that run these kinds of businesses. Your post helps ground and frame the discussion appropriately.
- FriendlyNormie 6y ago
  Thanks for sucking up to the other commenter in this totally organic exchange between two people who definitely aren’t Facebook employees.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dmode 6y ago
This is a great post. But the biggest opportunity here is to build an aggregate SMB platform to take on Amazon. In my local downtown, I see a ton of mom and pop stores, but they don’t get a ton of foot traffic. I sometimes imagine unlocking their inventory that can allow for some inherent advantages like same day pick-up and supporting local businesses

champagnepapi 6y ago

Does this work for subscription based businesses?

rbarnes01 6y ago

Interesting that their preview doesn't show any stars/reviews. I wonder if they will add this feature in the future?

TYPE_FASTER 6y ago

Uber buys GrubHub, Facebook creates a Facebook Shop vertical for restaurants and food. Most places have a Facebook page anyway.

einpoklum 6y ago

I just wish we could read on HN tomorrow: "Introducing Antitrust action against Facebook (justice.gov)"

jedberg 6y ago
That's not likely to happen under this President unless MZ says something nasty about him. Otherwise you'll probably have to wait until the next admin at least.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- einpoklum 6y ago
  This is likely to happen neither under a Biden administration nor under a Trump one.
ikeyany 6y ago
Elizabeth Warren's campaign focused on tempering the powers of Facebook and other tech giants. However her campaign failed to gain serious traction, for various reasons.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  > Elizabeth Warren's campaign focused on tempering the powers of Facebook and other tech giants While she made that point, I would say that was more rhetoric than serious intent. That's not only because of Ms. Warren's strong party-establishment loyalties, but more significantly because of her stated intent and practice of being financed by large pro-corporate donors (albeit not Facebook) and her disinterest in combating the political influence of the tech giants on the donation-recipient side.

aboringusername 6y ago

To me, it seems like these tech giants want the internet to start and end with their platforms. Facebook is becoming (or has become) people's experience of the "internet", it has a lot of what people want. My concern is there isn't yet a law or enforced guidelines (similar to the GDPR) about machine learning, and what happens when it gets things wrong. Recently, we've seen with a postcast app and pushbullet being threatened on Google. What happens if an AI or system decides it no longer likes your shop, or factors outside your control cause it to be flagged? A commenter worried about MLM's, which is a valid point. Will we know the identity of the FB user who made the shop? How does the ownership process works? (I.E who actually "owns" the FB shop on FB and get admin controls). I refuse to engage with and use FB, it may be that some shops become entirely FB oriented and forget "mycoolshop.com", because FB provides all the tools a business owner needs. Sad, but slowly we're seeing the death of the internet we all wanted and possibly knew for a time in the early part of the century.

amelius 6y ago

Another BigCorp trying to put a gate around an existing market, this time it's retail. Yuck.

riazrizvi 6y ago
"Is your store doing well? Have you expanded to a couple of other locations successfully? Is it time for you to create a broader franchise? ... Don't worry, we've been watching, and we already made this information available to big stores in your area who were willing to pay for the privilege. That's why Big-store-chain is already negotiating a better contract with your supply chain. I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted. Thank you for your business." - American Edge. It's our edge, not yours.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Traster 6y ago

That advert is an incredibly tone deaf advert. Support the little guy! Yes, support little Mark Zuckerberg and his sole control of a $600Bn company. Has it ever occured to anyone in a multi billion dollar corporation that maybe it doesn't come across well to pretend you're fighting for the little guy. Why not take a break for once and just say "Hey, we're fucking enormous, no one even browses the web anymore, they browse facebook, so we've deigned to give you the smallest sliver of access to our amazing hoard of treasure - customers (in exchange for 90% of your profits)". At least it would be honest.

creddit 6y ago
As always, when you’re everyone’s favorite punching bag: damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Would love to know how you got to them taking 90% of the profits. Are they even charging commissions or is this a scheme to drive more ads purchases?
- Traster 6y ago
  I love it, spend a decade engaging in scummy behaviour, and then have people completely ignore that and claim that you're just a punching bag. Do you know how you become the everyone's favourite punching bag? Stand by and watch whilst people use your platform to commit genocide, and then tell everyone you're looking out for the little guy. Damned if you do enable a genocide, damned if you... oh no, just the first one.
  - creddit 6y ago
    This would be a great rebuttal to someone who said “I like that Facebook helps people kill people” but is a pretty weak rebuttal to someone calling out you making up fee structures for the product and your silly moralizing over a company launching... checks notes... a way for people to sell things on the internet. The horror.
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sub7 6y ago

lol FB trying to fuck over 3rd party sellers and Amazon is like go ahead chumps we've been at this for decades. Seriously though who the hell trusts FB. Nobody. They should fold.

dylkil 6y ago
>Seriously though who the hell trusts FB. Nobody. 2.6 billion monthly active users beg to differ
- sub7 6y ago
  I'm one of them. But the graph is going down and engagement is going down faster, hence the frantic acquisition of anything else that gains traction - IG, WA etc. Tiktok won't sell and their curve is convex so let's see what happens in the next couple years.

swiley 6y ago

Yes tie yourself to a large platform that can and will shut you down for political/social reasons. Or just stick a paypal button on a static site.

fsociety 6y ago
Yep that worked well for Wikileaks
- Tepix 6y ago
  Yep, Wikileaks is still around. Their store is at https://wikileaks.shop/ https://wikileaks.shop/ or https://eu.wikileaks.shop/ https://eu.wikileaks.shop/

CosmicShadow 6y ago

As someone with an Etsy shop this got me excited for a second, but unless I missed something, this is just some sort of link from your FB Page to some integrated shop? We use Etsy because we get all these sales from people using it to search for stuff, but I guess if we only have 80 people and spend no money on FB ads or trying to grow our page, this is essentially completely useless as we already have links to our shop... We were hoping this was some sort of shop built into marketplace that was curated or searchable or something, since we've had some success selling on there, but it's a complete garbage pile and dealing with people is awful and doesn't scale very fast. People flake out like crazy, no way to manage messages well or anything. Missed opportunity. Maybe for Instagram, having a shop built into your profile could be awesome instead of saying, "link in profile" then having your user search for the product they say starting at your site homepage.

codecamper 6y ago
If you make a shop on FB Shops, please know that you do not need Shopify to do that. Shopify provides no benefit and charges you per transaction.

pot8n 6y ago

>Introducing Facebook Shops: Helpi... stopped reading right there. I can't stand the FB bullshit anymore.

youareostriches 6y ago

Facebook needs to be broken up immediately, and their core platform offering replaced by an open protocol.

holler 6y ago
why open protocol and not help other competitors gain market share?

yalogin 6y ago

What took it so long for FB to do this? This is honestly one of the first things they should have done.

Mengkudulangsat 6y ago
They are waiting for Libra.

mnehring 6y ago

Has anyone seen anything specifically mentioned about an API? I did a quick search and didn't see anything mentioned, but if they integrated with 3rd party tools, either they have an API or they already programmed a feed scraping tool of some sort. I suppose if there is an API, but they haven't released public documentation, it might be possible to find out details about many of the endpoint from WooCommerce's code.

busymom0 6y ago
As someone who’s been burnt by using their IG API before when they decided to shut it down out of nowhere, I won’t trust their API for this.
- mnehring 6y ago
  For my personal selling, I wouldn't trust the API's:-). However, I have a product that helps a particular retail vertical list their items for sale online. I imagine my clients wouldn't mind having their items automatically cross-posted to Facebook's shop as well. (So, if Facebook kills the API, it would kill a feature in my product, but not my whole product.) That's why I was wondering about the API. I'll probably need to do some reading and searching today when I get some time!

pramit 6y ago

Truho.com

NicoJuicy 6y ago

And using the big E-commerce platforms. Reducing opportunity for a software developer with his own platform to connect to it, what is basically just a product feed + order confirmation endpoint. And more useless noice on Facebook of everyone promoting their take-away. Ugh Ps. I buy local, the take-aways across the street. Not the 30 places from my old hometown.

Thorentis 6y ago

It's fascinating to see these tech giants fight each other for control over the Internet empire. Eventually I think we will see 1 by 1 they will fall, and a couple will remain. This is Facebook's attempt to take on Amazon and Google both at once, and given their huge user base and method of engagement, they may just have a shot at it. I can see it now. Scroll Instagram to see photos of your friends wearing new clothes, "like" the photo. Get an ad the next day for that same product now available from a Facebook Shop for 40% off. Use your Facebook Credits to buy it.

gitgud 6y ago
They might also implement object detection within photos and match things in the photo to products you could buy... on Facebook...
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Google could do this with Chrome... They already have the "right click, search google for things looking like this image". All they'd need to do is make the UI more discoverable and make the search results include products, and they'd be $1B up on revenue...
  - woodrowbarlow 6y ago
    i don't think the "search by image" tool is doing as much computer vision as you think it is -- it seems to mostly match shapes and colors.
- AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  That is a core selling feature of Shops: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2686633214905269 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2686633214905269
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draw_down 6y ago

tams 6y ago

In the light of this, it's much more obvious why they stared exposing the Facebook brand in their Instagram and WhatsApp properties.

_448 6y ago

Looks like a challenge to Amazon minus the warehouses!

stevespang 6y ago

I would NEVER get involved in anything Zuckerberg and his ilk create, trying to monopolize the world. Shopify will always be 10x better.

kull 6y ago

Any idea how to apply for the early access to this api?

bitL 6y ago

Some time ago I was thinking what would it take to bring down Facebook and one of the ideas was for social platform to allow direct sales for hobbyists/small shops. They managed to patch this vulnerability now.

rodolphoarruda 6y ago

Another nail in the decentralized web coffin. The big steam machine is working at full power.

kumarvvr 6y ago

Shopify will be the loser here. FB will use them, chew and spit them out. FB only wants shopify now because it has all the data, inventory, categorization, etc. The next logical move would be to buy a company like wix, then target smb with their sales and marketing team to help them make digital storefronts on FB, integrate with their social platform and then ditch shopify. Edit : Also, there is no way to tell if your competitor is paying to get your data and costomer info. This will lead to an overall weakening of the mom and pop store operations, where they are disrupted ever more easily by the competition.

ta17711771 6y ago
True. Square bought Weebly for this.

WrongThinkerNo5 6y ago

I still remember that time when Zuck publicly admitted that he was aiming for Facebook to replace the internet, which was clearly promptly scrubbed from the internet (it is one of those regrets that I did not save the video even though I realized it was important, while not realizing we actually had memoryholes already). It seems more than ever that he is well on the way to doing so, as it becomes ever less likely that any kind of relief or resolution will come from captured regulators, let alone captured and bought off legislators. Pretty soon, real competition will be dead, it has little life left in it as is.

dadarepublic 6y ago

Tangentially related: >'GrokNet', the AI behind Facebook Shops, looks for body type, skin tone, location, socioeconomic class in photos https://boingboing.net/2020/05/20/groknet-the-ai-behind-fac.html https://boingboing.net/2020/05/20/groknet-the-ai-behind-fac.... Is there good reason to be concerned on this level?

ta17711771 6y ago

FTC is asleep at the wheel, with Facebook. Did you know they're doing dating, gamestreaming, classified ads....list goes on longer than my patience.

rakoo 6y ago

The WeChat-ification of FB is going forward. There is still so much to do, but I for one am happy that total control over society's interaction by a single company is slowly coming over to the Western world. (For reference if you don't have wechat or alipay in China, you might as well live as an hermit because fewer and fewer places will accomodate you)

sarfrazarshad 6y ago

Facebook has had the shop option for quite some time now on the Facebook pages. I have used it, it really sucked. What's new here? Checkout option? The Instagram shop is new that's for sure. But I am not sure how that will perform.

sarfrazarshad 6y ago
Discovery was a real issue. I hope they have improved it now