A Hassle-Free Way to Start Selling and Advertising on Facebook and Instagram

11 min read

Finding customers is heavy lifting for any beginner small business. But leveraging a network of 2.9 billion consumers categorized by age, action, and interest can certainly help. And Facebook is happy to step in and fill that gap.

Not only setting up a Facebook Shop helps increase sales, but it also allows you to better understand your customers’ interests and needs and tweak your promotional campaigns to fit them.

Getting started with selling and advertising on Facebook and Instagram is a breeze even if you’re new to ecommerce, never advertised on social media, or just not tech-savvy. Especially if you have Ecwid on your side.

Ecwid E-commerce has always been a champion for small businesses hungry for easy and effective ways to sell online. With Ecwid, you can tap into 10+ sales channels, including Facebook and Instagram, to grow your reach on platforms where your customers already spend most of their time — AND control all of that from a single dashboard.

We’ve been partnering with Facebook for years to give you access to some of the best social selling tools available for your online store:

Facebook Shop
Instagram Shop
Facebook Product Catalog (a fancy file that’s filled with important product details like pictures, prices, and titles, to easily create product ads)
The Facebook Pixel
And Facebook Messenger.

Selling on social media with these specialized tools can put you lightyears ahead of competitors who are still mired in the traditional ideas of social sharing.

With Ecwid, you can automatically upload and sync your product catalog to both Facebook and Instagram, drive sales with dynamic Facebook and Instagram advertising, understand your customers’ behavior with Facebook Pixel, and support your customers with Facebook Messenger right on your storefront.

Please note that on April 27, 2023, Meta announced changes to Facebook and Instagram Shops across different regions. See how your Shops on Facebook and Instagram experience may be affected in the Meta Business Help Center.

Sell Products in Facebook Shops and on Instagram

Getting your products on Facebook opens up some awesome e-commerce opportunities to grow your online sales:

Sell your products through Facebook’s familiar (and popular) interface
Get a Facebook shop section on your Business page that’s easily accessible across all devices for all your page’s fans
Help customers find products faster with a simplified search feature that organizes products into collections (if you’re on Ecwid, your existing product categories will be automatically synced into Facebook collections to make set-up even easier)
And tag products in your picture posts to improve visibility in users’ feeds.

More on Ecwid’s social selling tools for Facebook →

A Facebook Shop on ANNA Cake Couture page

A single product catalog is used across Facebook and Instagram for fast and seamless connection and sync with both platforms. Once set up, your product catalog can be used to reach over 2.85 billion potential customers on Facebook plus another billion on Instagram.

If you have a Facebook Business Page connected to your product catalog, you can get an Instagram Shop to:

Tag products in Instagram posts to let users easily discover them
Sell right in your Instagram Stories with product stickers
Get your shoppable posts featured in the Explore section to be seen by thousands of potential customers
And receive a permanent Shop tab on your Instagram Business Profile with all your tagged products to let shoppers easily access your purchasable products.

Advertise Across Facebook and Instagram

The beauty of Facebook advertising lies in its large audience and flexible targeting options. Whether you specialize in sailing watches, quinceañera dresses, or sequined bell-bottoms, there’s a pretty good chance your target audience is hanging around on Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook Product Catalog works with a variety of Facebook ad types and formats, including Dynamic ads that automatically show your product catalog to the most relevant audience across Facebook, Instagram, the Audience Network, and Messenger.

Facebook advertising supports targeting for all sorts of interests, age groups, and locations, in addition to retargeting your store visitors, looking for more people like your customers — you name it. And Ecwid’s integration with the Facebook pixel helps you use customer behavior data as well (page views, abandoned carts, etc.) to show your ads to more relevant audiences.

Using rich but easy-to-use Facebook advertising tools ensures your ads are seen by the people who are interested in your product. That means your ad budget is spent wisely and brings you the results you want:

Get detailed insights on your ads performance to identify which ads worked better and prevent spending more on the ones that bring less sales.
Target different groups of customers with different messaging. That way, your potential customers see only ads that are relevant to them — and are more likely to engage with such ads.
Forget about guesswork. Getting the detailed insights into your customers behaviour AND your ad performance means you can optimize your efforts to reach the goals you set up for your business.

Support Shoppers in Facebook Messenger

When you shop in a brick-and-mortar store, there’s always someone you can ask for help. Of course, that’s not necessarily the case with online stores. But if you sell on Facebook with Ecwid, you can easily add Messenger to your online storefront to answer customer questions in real-time. What’s more: studies have even shown that having a live chat on your storefront can boost conversions by up to 45%.

Connect Facebook Messenger to Ecwid →

You can also add a Facebook Messenger live chat to your website to provide real-time customer care

Manage Your Store Easily

While it’s possible to manually sell in Facebook shops or on Instagram without an e-commerce platform, there are some crucial elements that you might be missing.

Shipping integrations: Ecwid calculates shipping rates automatically for major providers like UPS, USPS, FedEx, Canada Post, Australia Post, and Royal Mail to let merchants know exactly how much to charge their customers for shipping and avoid paying for excess costs out of their own pockets.
Catalog management: E-commerce platforms like Ecwid support bulk edits, stock level control, and per product tax settings. For a merchant who’s just starting out selling online, those capabilities might not seem all that important. But when you start managing your store day-to-day, we promise, you’ll be glad you have them.
Discount coupons: A flexible discount system is the bread and butter of e-commerce stores. Discount coupons can effectively lure new shoppers and retain existing ones. With Ecwid, you can set up discount coupons in percentage and absolute values, combine them with free shipping, and even assign them to specific customer groups. Out-of-the-box social media e-commerce tools? Not so much.
Selling subscriptions: Providing ongoing products or services to customers in exchange for regular scheduled payments creates a reliable, recurring revenue. With Ecwid, you can charge customers daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. You can also collect recurring donations with this tool.
More sales channels: Ecwid products can be sold on multiple websites, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, Etsy, in-person using POS integrations, and in a native e-commerce mobile app. All from a single dashboard.