Link your eCommerce store to Facebook

There are many small businesses that start out entirely on Facebook. From dressmakers to shoe sellers, people can carve out the start of a successful business just on Facebook.

As business booms and the brand grows, people quickly outgrow Facebook as the only way they can sell products. Facebook’s shop listing for business pages is fairly limited, mainly as it’s not supposed to be an eCommerce solution.

That being said, for any business that has grown through selling on Facebook, moving away from that platform can be hard. Especially if they feel they have to sever ties between their brand and it’s Facebook shop.

Building an eCommerce store with WooCommerce

One of the main options for any new eCommerce website is to use Woocommerce. As it’s part of the well-used WordPress ecosystem, by using WooCommerce you get access to an unrivalled array of plugins and functionality not just for your store, but for your entire website.

Unlike other eCommerce platforms, WooCommerce comes with an incredible range of features. It can be daunting for novices, as it has so many parts to any product listing. The beauty of the complexity is that one you use WooCommerce for your eCommerce website you’ll never outgrow it. It is unrivalled in terms of eCommerce options.

As a web design agency who work exclusively with Elementor, we highly recommend Elementor and Woocommerce together. For our recent client, Trot On Equestrian Supplies, we built a somewhat complex eCommerce website. With numerous categories, sub-categories, product filtering and search pages, it was not an easy website to build. Regardless of the complexity, by using Elementor with WooCommerce we were able to turn out the website in around a week.

So, if you’re thinking of getting an eCommerce website, choose to build a WooCommerce website with Elementor. If you don’t want to build it yourself, get in touch with an Elementor & Woocommerce expert!

Link to Facebook

While moving away from selling on Facebook might seem like you are ditching Facebook entirely, it’s actually not the case. As I said in the last section, by choosing to have an eCommerce website built with Woocommerce and WordPress you have access to an unrivalled array of plugins.

A very useful plugin for WooCommerce is the ‘Facebook for Woocommerce’ plugin. And this is the plugin that means just because you’re moving away from Facebook you don’t have to completely leave Facebook behind.

With the Facebook for WooCommerce plugin, you can create a constant link between your new eCommerce website and your Facebook shop.

If you’ve never used Facebook shop before for your business you can still benefit from linking your online shop to your Facebook business page.

Managing products and stock

In the past when you wanted to add products to a Facebook shop you would have to manually upload images and text content. Add prices and ways to take payments.

If you then got an eCommerce store you might need to do the same process twice. Adding products to your website and your Facebook page would be a total time drain!

With the Facebook for WooCommerce plugin you only need to upload new products once. As soon as you upload a product to your website it will automatically add it to your Facebook page’s shop.

Need to change the product description or stock level for an existing product? No problem! Any changes to products on your Woocommerce shop will also be automatically updated in Facebook.

Any payments? The listing on the Facebook shop will have a button that takes interested customers over to that product’s page on your website where they can easily pay.

Advertising through Facebook

What’s the point of linking your eCommerce shop to your Facebook page?

At the start I said that businesses outgrow Facebook as an eCommerce solution, so why carry on using it? The reason is two-fold.

Firstly, you can still allow existing Facebook customers to carry on buying from your Facebook page. By listing products for sale on Facebook it also allows you to be found and your products are found much easier on Facebook.

Secondly, if you want to run any advertising on Facebook it’s an awful lot easier and much more successful when you’ve got all of your products already linked to Facebook. You can run advertising campaigns on Facebook and target specific people based on their interests and make it really easy for them to buy from you.

By working with both a Facebook shop and a WooCommerce website you really do get the best of both worlds!

In summary

Whether you’re looking to move upwards from selling on Facebook to an eCommerce store or looking to link your existing store to Facebook, try the Facebook for WooCommerce plugin.

You can quickly and easily benefit from website traffic and social media traffic to boot and maximise your sales.

If you need help setting up an eCommerce website, or would like help with linking Facebook to WooCommerce, get in touch.