Digital Interactive Services
Facebook Marketplace guide to boost online sales
With more than a billion daily users in 70 countries, Facebook Marketplace for business is fast gaining acceptance among the 2.93 billion global users of the social media platform. It is a technology powerhouse to scale up sales and enhance profits for businesses at a rapid pace. With over 66% of Facebook users interacting with their accounts daily, it is challenging for businesses to find another platform where it is as easy to sell products. Here, we investigate how businesses can benefit from the Facebook Marketplace service.
What is Facebook Marketplace?
As the name suggests, it is an online marketplace where Facebook users can buy and sell new or used products to buyers searching for them.* This makes business efforts focused and yields high results. Users can browse the marketplace and select categories and their preferred stores to buy the products. Business owners can list their products in any of these categories:
Deals
Clothing and accessories
Electronics
Classifieds
Family
Entertainment
Housing
Hobbies
Vehicles
Home and garden
Home sales
Benefits of Facebook Marketplace for businesses
Unlike other marketplaces, Facebook does not charge an upfront fee to list the products and sell locally. If the products require shipping, Facebook charges 5% of the price from the seller. This brings us to the numerous benefits of Facebook Marketplace.
With different tools available to market your business, such as the merchant selling features, marketing automation tools, and chatbots, you do not have to develop your own tools. You can also create automated replies to popular questions from users.
Use Facebook messenger to sell directly to the potential buyers one-on-one. Answer the buyers’ questions in real time and close the deal before they lose interest and move on to another platform. Interacting with prospective buyers makes them feel comfortable.
The Facebook Marketplace algorithm shows users the most relevant products based on their actions on the platform. This makes it easy for businesses to find the right customers and quickly close the sale. Use ads to target users who have already purchased from your store or follow your page. You can create the ad using the templates with any of the following objectives:
Brand reach
Awareness
Video views
Website traffic
Messages
Lead generation
Catalogue sales
Conversions
Store traffic
Facebook does not provide sales transaction services and gives you the freedom to choose any payment method. The different facebook marketplace management methods include PayPal, bank transfer, cash, or Shopify.
Upload the product details and photos directly through the mobile application to make the process faster. Potential customers can browse your products on the iOS or Android mobile app and start interacting with the seller. This makes the selling process faster and more convenient.
Useful tips for selling on Facebook Marketplace
Selling your products on Facebook is a comfortable process. With a massive reach, you can achieve your target traffic numbers immediately that would otherwise take months for you to generate on your own brand app or website. As Facebook is trusted globally, customers are more comfortable making a purchase knowing that the business is backed by Facebook. Therefore, business owners must take advantage of every opportunity presented by Facebook.
Read the Facebook Marketplace guidelines to understand which products you can sell. There is a list of prohibited products that could get your account blocked. Products that are in high demand include furniture, toys, lifestyle products, vehicles, and more.
The quality of your photos decides the sales on an online platform. Since the customers cannot physically feel the product, they need to know the dimensions of the product. A good smartphone will do the job adequately. Take photos against a black or a white background and provide information about warranty and defects (if any).
Research the product on other marketplaces and set a price that is competitive. Without research, you could overprice or under-price the product.
Once a potential customer shows interest, discuss the deal over Facebook Messenger. These details include price, condition, payment methods, delivery details, and so on. You can either hand over the product in person or ship it.
How can Infosys BPM help?
To deal with increasing competition, businesses are selling over multiple marketplaces. However, doing so is a complex process. You may need the expertise and the right systems to manage the ecosystem of marketplaces. Without this, you can restrict your ability to boost sales over marketplaces. The e-commerce marketplace-managed services help businesses launch and manage their inventory across multiple marketplaces. The value-driven services include:
- Brand governance
- Catalogue management
- Marketing operations
- Customer/back-office support
- Reporting and analytics
View the complete marketplace management services portfolio from Infosys BPM.
*For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.
