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I’m considering creating a Facebook Shop (probably Instagram as well) and was wondering if anyone here has tried this? Basically, I want to have a Facebook Shop and link it to Facebook Marketplace. I’m selling obscure vintage items (like old electronics, ephemera, trucker hats, jackets, etc). I don’t want to pay for ads on Facebook, so I would be counting on people finding this weird old stuff organically through the Facebook Marketplace search. Has anyone been successful selling vintage items on Facebook? I have almost 2,000 items on eBay, so I have plenty of things that I could also put on Facebook.
Specifically, I use Sixbit to manage and list my eBay listings. Sixbit can be linked to Shopify. And then Shopify has integration with Facebook Shops. It is kind of convoluted, but would keep my inventory management system in place. To set up shop on Facebook, I would need to spend another $40/month to upgrade my Sixbit plan, plus another $30/month to sign up for the basic Sixbit plan. I don’t think Facebook charges to set up a shop, so I would only be paying fees there when something sells.
Any thoughts?
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Well, I decided to take the plunge and try it out. I upgraded my Sixbit plan, signed up for Shopify (with the free trial, then took the special offer of 50% off for a full year), and created a Facebook Shop, which launched on June 19.
Holy cow, setting all this up was not easy.
1. The shipping settings on Shopify are very lacking. You can put in each individual item’s weight, but it doesn’t have any way to provide the dimensions (you just set a standard size for all your packages). You set up default shipping options for the customer (ie USPS First Class, Priority Mail, FedEx Ground, etc.). Essentially, I decided to exclude all my oversize packages from Shopify so I don’t lose big money shipping them. I think they have paid apps that allow you to put in the full dimensions for shipping estimates, but I don’t really want to spend money on that.
2. You also have to pick a design template and customize your Shopify store, as well as set terms and conditions, return policy, etc. You also need to input your payment settings, link to your bank, PayPal, and some other numerous settings before you can go live.
3. I already had set up a Facebook Business Page for my company (which is required before you link any of this), but creating a Facebook Shop (and enabling Facebook Marketplace) and linking it to Shopify (through a Shopify App) took me watching an hour-long video on YouTube with step by step directions (which took me much longer due to the weird steps and also a technical snafu that I had to troubleshoot during the process).
4. Once the link was established, Meta Commerce Manager immediately started showing errors in my listings. Apparently, Shopify listings do not automatically have all the fields that Facebook shows, such as “Condition.” To my horror, Facebook had automatically set my entire store inventory as “new”, even though I primarily sell used items). Facebook also automatically classifies your listings into google product categories unless you set them on your own. To fix all this, I had to manually go to the Facebook App page on Shopify and go through each of my 1700+ listings and change the fields to either new/used and pick a product category. This took me probably 10 hours. There is no means that I could find to do this in bulk using a spreadsheet upload.
5. The Shopify API must be fairly limited, so SixBit can only automate so much. It sends the pictures to Shopify, the item description, item weight, the price, and a couple other fields that are more minor. It can’t send item condition (new, used) or set the google product category. It syncs my inventory to my other sales channels so when items sell on one, they are removed (or quantity adjusted) on the other channels.
6. On Facebook, I learned that for items that are in the clothing category, you have to provide a “Size” field. Again, Shopify does not have this field by default. I had to contact Shopify Support, who instructed me to create a “variation” on those clothing items, even if I had only 1 size of it. I don’t sell tons of clothing, but manually creating those variations in Shopify (so they would feed to my Facebook Shop) took a couple hours. On the plus side, Shopify support staff on the chat seemed very impressive. They know their product well.
7. Facebook has some restrictions on selling certain items, much like eBay’s VERO program. They wouldn’t let me list items with certain name brands (such as Hugo Boss and, oddly, Magnavox). They also don’t allow things like pocket knives. They also flagged some weird stuff, like a circuit board for a security system I’m selling, which the AI somehow decided is a device to allow pirating software. You are allowed to contest the rulings, but I only had limited success. In any case, I only had 8 items rejected out of 1700+ I put up for sale, so not a huge deal.
Anyway, I launched my store on June 19. I sold 3 items on Facebook Marketplace in the first week for about $125. I haven’t had a sale since then. Facebook provides some analytics and the curve of views for my items is really depressing. On June 20, I had 433 views. On June 21, I had 498 views. Then, views go tumbling down a cliff to 401, 286, 149. Now, it seems to have settled in for the moment between 30 and 60 views each day, and 10 of those views seems to be only for 1 item, so they are not even scattered across my large inventory. When I search Facebook Marketplace, I cannot even find my items. I literally can type in the exact terms of my item titles, and they don’t show up in the Marketplace search.
Here’s an item I know I will be the only person with one listed: “Hilltop Tavern Eldorado, Kansas Red Mesh Vintage Snapback Trucker Hat.” It shows up with no results when I search it. If you guys can help me out, please search Facebook Marketplace for it and let me know if you see it.
My next step is getting set up Shopify with Google Shopping integration. I tried to get that running, but ran into some issues I need to spend some time fixing. I also need to set up Instagram Shopping. Unfortunately, I never used Instagram before this and when I created an account for it and switched it to a business account, Instagram immediately locked me out (even though it was linked to a long-time Facebook account).
It’s too early to decide if this was a good plan or not. I guess I’m glad I at least have a few sales. I’ll see how it goes, especially when the holiday shopping season starts. Hope this is helpful to anyone else thinking of doing the same thing I just did.
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Not sure if you sold the hat yet but I did a search and plenty of trucker hats showed but not the Hilltop Tavern.
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Thanks for checking for me. The hat is still for sale, so clearly it is not showing up in Marketplace search. I’ve been going back and forth with Facebook Business Support. There is definitely a language barrier, so they so far they don’t seem to even grasp the problem I’m having. I keep getting canned answers to my questions that really don’t relate to the issue. Very frustrating.
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Good experiment! IS it free to have all your items on Facebook? Or do they take a piece of the selling cost?
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Wow, this is great information Zach. I actually was contemplating setting up a Shopify site recently. My primary goal was to have a website for my business that I could use as a marketing tool to solicit that I buy model train collections, but I figured if I could sync a Shopify site with my eBay inventory maybe I could drive some sales through the website too. I signed up for a trial on Shopify and began the process of setting up the store and after a few hours invested over a couple of days I put the brakes on the whole project. The complexity of the setup and fields not carrying over from eBay to Shopify that you experienced are exactly the things that caused me to bail. I ended up settling for a much simpler, and cheaper, Wix site that accomplishes my primary goal and still has a basic “shop” link in the navigation menu that takes the person to my eBay store. I may have to revisit Shopify or the ecommerce features in Wix in the future as several model train distributors I’ve spoken with recently will only sell to dealers that have a brick & mortar store or a business website with a shopping cart like Shopify, they will not deal with you if you only sell on Ebay, Amazon etc.
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Read your original post a couple days ago and just now getting to throwing in my 2 cents worth. Yes, setting up a Facebook Shop can be complicated, and in my opinion, not worth the time and effort. Because they use Google Shopping requirements, which are geared to New – Branded products with generally large stock quantities, it can be difficult for many resellers to comply. We have a Farcebook Biz page and Shop page. We use RSS Feeds from our own website to populate social media a lot, and so it was pretty quick for me to place a feed in our Facebook Shop. My background is in programming and I do that sort of thing a lot. Also we have items selling on Ebay, Etsy, Bonanza, eCrator and others. And we use our website RSS Feeds to show most of our “stuff” on our Pintrest Business boards.
However as far as Facebook goes, I only did one category (one that was same on our website and our Ebay store) on our FB Shop on a lark. Most of what we do on FB is on our Business pages sharing our item photos and descriptions which are clickable back to our website where they can be purchased, incidentally – that’s how I set up the FB Shop as well. Sale is not completed on FB but on our website.
All of this focus on pointing to our website keeps our costs lower; and since the RSS Feeds automatically update once I set them up, it’s relatively “painless”.
We have no plans to expand our FB Shop – just too much trouble. Cheers
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Will, it’s great to see there are other resellers out there using social media to drive sales to their own website. I feel like this is the “next step” in any business that sells physical goods these days and as a reseller I see it as the key to being more platform agnostic.
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Thanks Jay. We don’t really list everything on each site we use. For example, on our Pinterest business boards I have set up feeds for about 8 of our websites more popular categories. And the fact that buyers use our website to complete the purchase of the item, it will automatically come out of the next feed. For ebay which has most all of our website categories on either of our two accounts, when it sells on ebay our website software automatically marks the item “Sold” and vice versa, then of course we have a record of that including the source of the sale. Our Inventory/Accounting software includes an entry for the source of the purchase which can be shown in a report. What we set out to do was to make as much of the multi-site listing as automatic as possible once set up for each ecommerce site, thus giving us accurate information and avoiding the dreaded ‘one item – two buyers’ issue (almost as bad as the ‘where the h*ll did we put that widget’ sale).
As for eCrater and Bonanza let me just say they are not our best performers, but listing on them probably helps with our product and name SEO. All of our venues have accounts with the same or similar name.
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Update: after over a month of back and forth with Facebook/Meta Business Support, they finally were able to fix the issue that was causing all my items to be hidden in Marketplace search (no, they didn’t tell me what they fixed or what was causing the problem). I’ve made a few more sales finally (one via Google Shopping and two from Facebook) and I’m getting some questions through Facebook Messenger from people about my products. I’m still only getting 20-25 hits on my Facebook listings per day, but I sell obscure vintage stuff that probably most people are not expecting to find on Facebook. If I can get Facebook/Shopify to generate around $250/month in sales, I would be happy for now. Hopefully it can do more, but we’ll see. Now that I’ve finished all the setup, it’s not that much work to cross-post to Shopify using Sixbit.
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I thought I’d give a final follow up on this topic I started.
After my annual Shopify plan came up for renewal, I decided to shut it down. For one, Shopify upped their prices fairly significantly. Mainly, though, I just wasn’t getting nearly enough in sales to bother with the hassle (I was lucky if I got 1 sale a month total between the Shopify Store itself and the integrations with Google Shopping and Facebook Marketplace). With the higher price to renew, I likely would have lost money on it overall most months and I didn’t see it growing over time.
I never could get Facebook Marketplace to consistently show my listings in Marketplace search, despite going back and forth with Meta’s horrendous tech support for months (they did fix it briefly, but the problem came back). I’m much happier to be done trying to force that Shopify/Facebook Marketplace integration to work properly.
Moving on, I’ve put an emphasis on my personal Facebook Marketplace to try to get some additional sales. Without a way to directly integrate with eBay or Sixbit, I’m either adding each item manually or using the bulk upload spreadsheet (where you can do 50 items at a time). I have about 300 items listed on there now. Despite offering shipping on many of my items, I’ve only had 1 sale that I actually shipped to someone over the last couple months of this experiment. I just don’t think people really shop for used items with shipping on Facebook. However, I’ve had pretty good luck with local pickup. It’s a bit of a pain to meet up with people, but I am selling at least a couple items per week. I’ve moved some items that had been sitting in my eBay store unsold for years (mostly larger stuff) for around the same price (if not more) than I was asking on eBay.
I’m now experimenting with joining different Facebook buy sell trade groups for various kinds of collectors and posting my items to those groups. It’s kind of like free targeted advertising, although I haven’t sold anything so far (mostly, the collectors just crow on about how my prices are too high).
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I’m the grump around here when it comes to these different platforms and Facebook is no exception. I have yet to see anyone give evidence that importing and maintaining their listings is profitable.
That being said, we also have been selling larger items on Facebook locally. As Steve said, most people are like us looking for deals at deep discounts. This is why we just sell items that we find for free and sell cheap.
Facebook buyers (like Craigslist) are very flakey. For every ten people who message us, one might actually show up. And then you deal with the guys who want to renegotiate on your doorstep.
It’s nice for some quick cash but selling on eBay is easier.
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”It’s nice for some quick cash but selling on eBay is easier”
Yes it is certainly my preference to not deal face to face with buyers (the introvert in me) but it’s nice to get that fee free cash and then go reinvest it at a yard sale.
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I’ve also found that item specific groups on FB are cheapskates like us, they belong just to hopefully snag a deal. Joining the rummage/yard sale groups is where I’ve gotten a lot of exposure and made most of my sales. I belong to over 20.
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The scam on facebook marketplace where the bots request your phone number is exhausting.
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@Zach thanks for the update. Over the past year did you attempt to promote your Shopify site through social media at all or were you just hoping for organic search hits? I admit my Shopify experiment isn’t going much better, I gave up on the sync app I was paying $30/month for. Similar to your Facebook support experience it was all overseas support people who would reply to my questions at 3am and never answered in a way where I felt they even understood what I was asking.
My Wix placeholder website that I created a year ago actually seems to be the best solution to drive traffic so far. I use the blogging feature regularly and even started using ChatGPT to help write new blog posts today. I cross-post my blog with my business facebook page using Wix’s facebook integration. I’ve also gone through Wix’s free SEO tuning tutorials and have gotten people contact me to sell model train collections through my website just from showing up in Google search. Wix’s ecommerce platform seems decent and claims to have eBay integration so I’m considering just going all in on Wix and see if I can make it work.
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No, I didn’t try to promote my Shopify site much on social media. I don’t really specialize in any one item type, so I was mainly hoping for Google Shopping and Facebook Marketplace search hits to drive some sales. I think it would be difficult to attract people to consistently visit an online store that sells often-weird random stuff.
Since I shut down my Shopify store, I went ahead and signed up for the paid version of Truegether (which imports from eBay). They had given me a 3-month trial earlier and I made a handful of sales (more sales than I had using Shopify and Facebook Marketplace), so I decided to give it a go. Truegether is about $20 a month and promotes your items on Google Shopping. You also set your Google Shopping budget (which I put at 15%). I’ll trial it on a paid basis for at least a few months here and see what results I get.
I haven’t checked out Wix. I may have to take a look.
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