How to Set Up a Facebook Store 2019: 3 Easy Ways to Start Selling

A Facebook store allows you to sell products through your Facebook Page.

You can set up a Facebook Page for your business that is separate to your personal Facebook account.

I won’t go into how to set up a Facebook Business Page here, but there are plenty of good step-by-step guides if you just search for them on Google.

Once you’ve set up your Facebook Business Page, you can start selling on Facebook by creating a tab for your store on this page.

When people visit your Facebook Page, they can click on your Store Tab and purchase products directly on your Facebook Store.

Needless to say, to get people to buy from your Facebook Store, you should be growing your Facebook audience / community as part of your overall business marketing plan.

Engaging your Facebook community is an excellent way to grow your business. Facebook makes it super easy for you to target users with specific interests, and it makes sharing (viral marketing) your content much easier than sticking to a single platform.

Ecommerce website builders have specialized features and functions to maximize your businesses’ online presence. If you create your Facebook Store directly through Facebook, there are limitations for you and your customers: these include a lack of syncing and payment types, as well as lower quality product images.

By connecting a Shopify website to your Facebook Store, however, you can avoid these frustrations. You’ll appeal to the same wide audience while keeping the advanced ecommerce features that come with using a specialized builder.

By using a website builder to connect your Facebook Store, any purchases will automatically come out of your inventory. This will make managing your store a lot easier! You can either keep your checkout on the Facebook page to keep the user journey as simple as possible, or you can direct customers to your own website’s checkout to introduce a wider range of payment types.

So what is the easiest way to start selling on Facebook?

Website builders allow you to set up your Facebook Store quickly and easily, all without requiring you to mess around with coding at all. The first thing you need to do is set up a Facebook Business Page. This is essential for selling through Facebook and creating your Facebook Store. Then all you need to do is add an app to your online store and you’ll be selling on Facebook in no time!

Not sure what a website builder is? Put simply, a website builder is the quickest, easiest and cheapest way of creating a website or online store.

The even better news? There are a number of online store builders that can automatically connect all your products to your Facebook Store. Check them out below: 

• Shopify – our highest rated ecommerce website builder
• BigCommerce – a dream for businesses wanting to sell large numbers of products online
• Squarespace – perfect for creative businesses thanks to its industry leading templates and designs

We recommend these three ecommerce builders because they offer top level service for a wide range of businesses. Shopify is a top all-round option for any online business, and has over 1 million active users worldwide. BigCommerce’s powerful features and impressive app store makes it a popular choice for large businesses managing an extensive inventory. And Squarespace is ideal for creative businesses, with its high quality designs and shipping fee calculator.

Once you have built your own online store, you can then expand your business presence by setting up a Facebook Store to start selling on Facebook.

If you’ve used an online store builder to create your ecommerce store, any changes or updates you make to your products will automatically be “pushed” through to your Facebook Store.

The benefit here is that you just have to update your product once, and your Facebook Store will also be seamlessly updated – saving you time and sanity!

We’ve included Shopify, BigCommerce and Squarespace in this guide as our recommended online store builders that work well with Facebook.

Now let’s delve deeper into each builder so you can see how easy it is to set up a Facebook Store.

Shopify is one of the best and fastest growing ecommerce website builders in the market today:

• 1 million+ active users
• Helped merchants process over $72 billion in sales
• Professional and polished design themes to make your store look great
• Hundreds of apps to expand the functionality of your online store – you can add them as your business grows and requires more features
• 24/7 support

To create your Facebook Store through Shopify, you just need to add Shopify’s free Facebook Channel app to your Shopify store. This app is included in all Shopify paid plans. Once you’ve set up the app, Facebook then creates a Store section on your Facebook page. This in turn displays your Shopify products for people to view and buy!

The Facebook Store app creates a Store tab for your Facebook Business Page that will automatically ‘push through’ your products to Facebook. You can manage your products, track sales, and process orders in Shopify, which will sync everything to display these changes in your Facebook Store.

Your customers can then browse your Shopify products on Facebook, and can even make a purchase without leaving the social site.

Check out these really cool features that Shopify allow you to control over your Facebook Store:

• Add products to Facebook with just one click! All extra product details automatically sync straight away.
• Sell through Facebook Messenger on your online store and Facebook pages. Customers get a personalized shopping experience, and can pay for and track their orders in Messenger.
• Visual Organization – You can add banners & change the number of columns of products
• Choose which products you want to sell on Facebook, and automatically import them from your Shopify store to your Facebook store
• Real-time updates – update your products on your Shopify store, and your Facebook Store is automatically updated as well.

If you set up an ecommerce website using Shopify, the platform makes it really simple for you to transport your products to your own Facebook Store.

Shopify offers a 14-day free trial, so you can get started without spending any of your own money. Click the button below to give Shopify a go.

BigCommerce is another very reputable ecommerce website builder, helping you build your own online store without having to worry about coding:

• Create targeted Facebook adverts to attract new shoppers and track your campaigns
• Has helped merchants process over $9 billion in sales
• Comprehensive set of “out of the box” tools to help you build your store
• Leverage different social channels to help you grow your sales (such as Facebook Store)
• Add more advanced tools through BigCommerce’s own app store (just like Shopify)

Setting up your Facebook Store with BigCommerce is pretty straightforward: you just have to follow these steps.

The process is very similar to Shopify, in that you’ll need to add BigCommerce’s free Facebook Shop app to your store. This will then make your products available on your Facebook Business Page.

Note: The functionality to check out directly on Facebook is currently only available to US-based BigCommerce users.

Adding the app is really quick and easy, so you can start selling products on Facebook in no time at all!

BigCommerce is one of the better ecommerce website builders available in the market today. In our opinion, their biggest competitor is Shopify (discussed above), and each of them has their own pros and cons.

Like Shopify, BigCommerce offers a free trial period, so you can try it and see if it’s the right builder for you. Hit the button below to get started.

Squarespace is more of an all-round website builder than Shopify and BigCommerce. Rather than being a specialized ecommerce builder, it primarily caters to building regular websites, such as portfolios, business and blog pages.

However, it also has a range of ecommerce features, so you can create an online store if you want to. This makes Squarespace particularly great if selling online isn’t the sole purpose of your website.

Squarespace’s high quality designs and creative freedom make it ideal for building a highly customized and professional ecommerce website. Some of its features include:

• Social integration makes it easy to share across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest
• Add maps, forms, surveys, and more to your website
• Capture long-term customers with email campaigns
• Unlimited products to sell through your online store
• Use videos, images, blog posts, and events to promote your products
• Catch customers with abandoned checkout recovery
• Mobile optimized checkout page

Squarespace has lots of different ways of connecting your social media accounts to your website. For example, you can link your Instagram and Facebook Business accounts to tag products and make shopping even easier for your followers.

You can also add Squarespace tabs showing either gallery or normal pages, as well as connect your Facebook Brand or Business page to your website.

Unlike Shopify and BigCommerce, you can’t sell directly through Facebook with Squarespace. However, you can still push, tag, integrate and share your products across Facebook, as well as Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.

First, you need to connect your Facebook account to your Squarespace site. You can then add a Facebook Share button to product items, gallery and events pages, and more.

One of the best features for your online store is automatically pushing content to Facebook. Remember, to do this, you must have a Business Facebook Page rather than a personal profile.

This means when you create new collections or update your products, all you have to do is click ‘Save & Publish’ in your settings. This publishes your content on your website, and shares your updates in a new Facebook post at the same time!

So, Squarespace isn’t quite as automatic or synced as Shopify or BigCommerce, but still offers strong social integration. Its strengths lie in its designs and strong visuals to appeal to customers, while using its strong social and ecommerce features to draw visitors to your website and your products.

Wix is most well known as a drag-and-drop website builder. Even though its core focus is not ecommerce (unlike Shopify and BigCommerce, which are solely focused on it), Wix does offer you some pretty functional tools for the job. This is a great option if you want to sell online, but aren’t looking to scale your business on a large scale just yet.

You can sell through Facebook with Wix by using the app Ecwid. Ecwid is the number one ecommerce app on Facebook, powering over 40,000 stores. It can also link to other social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest.

• Over 109 million websites have been built with Wix
• Pure drag-and-drop interface, so you can insert content anywhere on your website
• Hundreds of beautifully designed templates
• App Market to add more functionality to your website (see our discussion here)
• Multiple payment options
• Create coupons and discounts

Wix’s ecommerce app, Ecwid, allows you to connect to Facebook and other social platforms to sell, sync and update your products. All you have to do is install the Ecwid app onto your Wix site in a few easy steps, then create an Ecwid account.

To sell on Facebook, you will need to sign up to the Ecwid Starter plan for just $7.99 a month. This is still cheaper than signing up to BigCommerce, for example, so it’s worth it if you want to sell online but aren’t ready to invest more money at this stage.

Once you’ve set up Ecwid with your Wix website, you can go about connecting your online store to your Facebook Business account!

With the premium version of the app, all your products will update automatically on Facebook if you make any changes in Wix. You can also fully customize your Facebook Store.

Ecwid’s ecommerce app makes it very simple and efficient to manage your Wix online store across different platforms.

Just like Shopify and BigCommerce, Wix offers a 14-day free trial for its ecommerce plans. This means you can try it out risk free for 2 weeks to see if it’s the right platform for you.

You no longer need to have a lot of technical knowledge to create your own Facebook Store, allowing you to sell products to potential customers who are hanging out on Facebook.

Reputable ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce, as well as website builders such as Squarespace and Wix, have apps that allow you to quickly and painlessly create your own Facebook store based on your existing portfolio of products.

Unlike Facebook itself, these website builders have powerful ecommerce functions to help you run your business and keep track of your stock levels while you’re selling. In today’s multi-channel world, selling on just one platform isn’t enough.

With this in mind, we don’t recommend only setting up your store just through Facebook. By linking a powerful and professional ecommerce website to your Facebook Store instead, you’re giving your online store the best chance of success!

The best part is that any updates you have are automatically synchronized with your Facebook Store – not only saving you a lot of time, but preventing any potential human errors from having to make a lot of updates over and over again.

With over 1 billion users each spending an average of over 50 minutes a day on Facebook, it’s wise to incorporate a Facebook social media strategy within your overall marketing strategy. Grow your community on Facebook – it’s an easy way to help you spread the word about your business.

Which website builder is it easiest to set up a Facebook Store with?

If you choose Shopify as your online store builder, all you have to do to create your Facebook Store is add their free app and you’re good to go! Your products will update automatically, plus your customers can even checkout directly on Facebook.

You can find out more about Shopify in our in-depth review.

What is the best way to sell through Facebook?

Using a website builder is hands down the best way to sell on Facebook. You can build a stylish and professional-looking online store quickly, then connect it to Facebook. Any changes or updates you make to your products will automatically sync to Facebook, so selling through the social media platform requires virtually no effort on your part!

Is having a Facebook store worth it?

Having a Facebook Store is a great way to grow your business, allowing you to tap into new audiences and gain more customers.

It makes sharing your content really easy, so it’s a great way to market your store and products, increase sales, and boost your bottom line!

How do you increase your conversions from a Facebook Store?

To increase your conversions from your Facebook Store, you need to grow your Facebook audience. This can be done through promoting Facebook posts – if you have the budget – or simply through increasing your Facebook activity.

You could also try searching for Facebook groups related to your store and post about your store in those, which may help increase your traffic and boost your conversions.

How do I set up a Facebook Store using Facebook?

You might not want to use a website builder to create your Facebook Store, and that’s okay! These steps are for setting up a US shop:

• First, make sure you’ve set up your Facebook Business page.
• Add a Store section to your page.
• Now add your products! Remember you can only sell physical products, and you must upload each one individually.
• Manage your products – add sizes and other product details for your customers to browse.
• Set up your payments options. You can either choose to send customers to checkout on your website, submit their order in a Facebook message, or complete their purchase directly through your Facebook Store page.
• Set up your shipping options.
• Save!

Once Facebook has reviewed and approved your products, they will then appear in your Facebook Store. Some payment features are not yet available in all areas.

Can I sell digital goods on my Facebook Store?

Sadly, the answer is no! This is another important reason for not relying on Facebook for your online business. You can only sell physical products through your Facebook Store. But with website builders like BigCommerce, you can easily sell both physical and digital products!

Which payment types does Facebook accept?

This depends on where you are. For US stores, where customers can checkout directly on your Facebook page, your money will come through either Stripe or PayPal.

If you’re outside the US, you will need to arrange a different payment method. This could be a bank transfer, cash, or telephone payment. This is easiest if you allow customers to contact your page through Messenger.