

Testing a New Way to Discover and Buy Products on Facebook - arrel
https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Discover-and-Buy-Products-on-Facebook-Test

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SchizoDuckie
When is facebook finally going to understand that people are not on facebook
to buy shit. They're there to communicate with people.

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hayksaakian
When people stop buying things on Facebook

They have yet to do so, and Facebook ads remain lucrative.

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jermo
How come an ad is called 'Suggested Post'?

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rhizome
They just omit the identity of the suggestor..

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ffumarola
Talk about closing the attribution gap present in almost all paid advertising.

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wehadfun
Next evolution: use their recognition algorithms to identify shirts,
jewelry,... in your friends photos and have "buy now" buttons all over the
picture.

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jcrjcr
I actually think that could be a decent way to balance the fact that people
don't want to see ads with the fact that FB has to have ads in order to make
money. As long as they did it in a way that didn't disrupt the user experience
too much

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qeorge
I like this for microtransactions, but I don't buy it for physical goods.

Couple reasons:

First, I'm surprised that anyone would purchase with so little information. A
photo/price doesn't seem like enough room to make the sale.

Second, the merchant loses the chance to upsell and/or retarget the customer.

What's the counterargument? That the conversion rate is improved enough to
offset these downsides?

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pbreit
Shopping experience on amazon seems much better but to counter-argue: 1)
incremental sales are gold and 2) I'd say getting a sale actually provides a
huge opportunity to cross-sell/engage.

I'm guessing this wont do well for mainstream, amazon-style commerce but could
find some niches like impulse buys, donations, tickets, etc.

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yeldarb
Are they taking 30% of the payment?

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NoodleIncident
Advertisers are still paying for the ads, so probably not.

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yeldarb
As logical as that sounds it's not the way it works for the "Buy Now" buttons
they've been testing on Virtual Goods ads for a while now:
[https://developers.facebook.com/docs/payments/ads_virtual_go...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/payments/ads_virtual_goods)

You pay to get distribution for your ad and if it converts you pay 30% of the
total purchase price on top of that.

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tehwebguy
Facebook and YouTube have both tried product sales with insane revenue splits
and seem to have failed so far. Not sure why they are trying this again.

My guess is that most don't have 30% _of gross_ spare when they could just
link out. It's one level of egregious for Apple to do it but at least they
have the stored credit cards to throw around, not really sure what Facebook is
bringing to the table here.

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skizm
Wonder if they will allow 3rd party payments through paypal, amazon, or
google.

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jmathai
If I were Facebook I'd want to control the entire process. I imagine for the
majority of their users it will be easier to simply get a credit card on file
and use that moving forward.

WRT _get a credit card on file_. Why would Facebook outsource storing payment
information?

Have any of the big players (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc) allowed you
to pay with a third party payment provider?

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sandesh247
You can use Paypal on Google Play:
[https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/4646425?hl=en](https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/4646425?hl=en)

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razvanr
This is great news! Two Tap (YC W14) offers a buy button for any app and we're
regularly seeing multipliers on conversion rate on mobile when streamlining
the checkout.

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redmattred
Fuck this.

