Facebook to let you buy stuff from retailer pages

Facebook’s business strategy increasingly seems to be borrowed from the lyrics to The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’. It’s latest bid to ensure that you never leave means that you can now buy products directly from retailers’ pages.

First spotted by Buzzfeed, the new feature essentially turns pages into mini ecommerce sites.

The shops are still in the testing phase, but some apparently already feature “buy” buttons.

The new feature is also designed to work on mobile from the get-go with pages now including a “shop” section which will appear as a seperate tab alongside Timeline, About, and Photos.

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“With the shop section on the page, we’re now providing businesses with the ability to showcase their products directly on the page,” Facebook product marketing manager Emma Rodgers told BuzzFeed News.

Facebook appears to have borrowed extensively from its existing functionality in developing the new feature. Images of the products on offer, for instance, work in much the same way as photos do on Facebook.

This move by Facebook is just the latest in a series of attempts by social networks to cash in on the ecommerce space. A year ago, for instance, Twitter tested out its own “buy now” button. An earlier experiment allowed you to tweet products directly into your Amazon shopping basket.

It’s understandable why social networks are so keen to play in the ecommerce space. Globally, it’s a trillion dollar plus market. Digital advertising, which is Facebook’s biggest revenue source, is only worth US$135.42-billion