Meta announced today that it will stop onboarding new Shops without the ability to checkout on Facebook and Instagram. And starting next year, Shops without in-app checkout enabled will no longer be accessible.
To back up a little, there are really two ways to sell products on Meta's platforms:
- Either you link to your own e-commerce store on, say Shopify or something, and customers check out on that site
- Or you create a kind of mini-store on Meta's side by connecting your product catalog, and customers can buy right on their device without having to leave Facebook or Instagram.
The latter sounds great, right? And for conversion rates, it usually is. There's less friction than leaving the app they're on and navigating some new web site. But that comes at a cost, as Meta charges a small percentage (usually 5%) of sales that use that checkout system.
Until now, you've been able to use the product catalog and then when people are close to a purchase, jump them over to your site. But starting in a few weeks, that won't be possible.
Quoting Techcrunch's coverage of this today:
This means that shops that direct people to an e-commerce site to complete a purchase, rather than allowing people to make a purchase directly through Facebook or Instagram, will no longer be accessible.
⛔ No Checkout? No Shop for You.
Starting on June 5, 2023, onboarding of any new Shops in the U.S. via Commerce Manager and Shopify will only be allowed if checkout on Facebook and Instagram is enabled. Then on August 10, 2023, this restriction will be extended to newly onboarded shops from all other partners. While businesses with existing Shops that do not currently enable in-platform checkout will continue to be supported until next year, but that will end in April 2024.
👋 Say Goodbye To Product Tagging
Meta is also removing features associated with Shops for businesses without checkout-enabled shops, including:
- Organic product tagging in posts
- Creating new custom/lookalike audiences derived from consumers who visited a Shop
The company added that starting in August, some businesses without checkout-enabled Shops will no longer be able to tag their products via the Content Publishing API. After August 10th, some users will receive an error when attempting to tag an ineligible product, and impacted product tags on previous posts will not be returned from the API endpoint.
Honestly, it's hard to look at this as anything other than a blatant grab for free money. By making it mandatory to use their platform, presumably, we'll all be paying Meta a fee just for the right to sell there. And that's something nobody asked for. Except maybe's Meta's accountants.
We reached out to Meta for clarification of rates and other details; they did not get back to us by deadline.
Image: Canva
