Facebook Announces End of Live Shopping in Favor of Short Form Reels
Meta has announced that from the 1st of October 2022 you will no longer be able to host or schedule any new Live Shopping events on the Facebook platform. Users will still be able to go Live on the platform, however, the ability to create product playlists or tag products will no longer exist.
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The reason for this seems to be Facebook prioritizing short-form content in a bid to compete more with the likes of TikTok which has become the dominant social media platform for the Gen Z crowd.
“If you want to reach and engage people through video, try experimenting with Reels and Reels ads on Facebook and Instagram. You can also tag products in Reels on Instagram to enable deeper discovery and consideration. If you have a shop with checkout and want to host Live Shopping events on Instagram, you can set up Live Shopping on Instagram.”
Meta Statement
Facebook Moves Away From Live Shopping As eCommerce Moves Closer
This decision on one hand is understandable, as at the core of their social media platform, they are directly competing with other social media outlets and the one with the most traction right now is TikTok.
With Instagram Reels, they have been trying to get closer and closer to the TikTok experience but somewhat failing. After a number of unpopular updates to the Instagram experience, it has left many users wanting to delete the app. In fact, VPNOverview.com research has found that there are over 682,000 monthly searches that reference deleting Instagram.
With that in mind could this be Meta’s attempt to try and plug the leak and get back to what they did best when it comes to social media and stepping away from eCommerce?
This is interesting as Amazon, eBay and Alibaba have all been getting more and more serious with their live shopping platforms.
Even in the most recent eBay Q2 Investor Call, Jamie Iannone was clear that Live Shopping did remain a core focus for eBay and was a key part of its long-term innovation plans for the marketplace.
This means for businesses that previously used the Facebook Live Shopping feature it would now be wise to start trying to migrate that audience to another live shopping platform of your choice.
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Dave Furness
Dave is a Co-Founder of eSeller365. For over 10 years he has been involved with eCommerce with a particular interest in the marketplaces and the huge opportunities available for sellers when utilizing a multi-channel strategy. After a year of being the UK’s youngest eCommerce consultant, he built an education platform called UnderstandingE that showed the world how to utilize Magento as the “Third Generation of Multi-Channel software”.
Dave has also created a YouTube channel dedicated to entrepreneurship and eCommerce as well as a podcast dedicated to mental health awareness. When Dave isn’t working his main interests include learning and playing Chess, researching the Crypto and NFT space, and trying to find the nearest beach.