Facebook’s Users Can Shop Online By Watching Videos

If any members of this social network see a product that they want to buy on Facebook, they can obtain such a thing easily just by sending the merchant a screenshot via messenger and waiting for the reply. It means that people could make all payments on this app.

Facebook’s Marketplace

Facebook is now developing a feature about the video. Its aim is allowing the sellers to advertise, illustrate, and invite the potential customers to buy their products when they are on live streams. Buyers can choose appropriate goods, then take screenshots, and send these photos to the sellers by using Facebook’s messenger. The next step to close a sale is that the sellers will reply with a payment request also on the app itself.

Before a broadcasting video is showed, the customers will be given notifications about it on the seller’s page. From the vendors’ perspective, this feature seems to be helpful because they have a chance to interact directly with purchasers, show the watcher's products’ demo, and clear up their queries immediately. This model is thought to be the same as the Home Shopping Network.

At this time, some Pages in Thailand are selectively conducting trials of this new feature. A product manager for Marketplace of Facebook, Mayank Yadav, said that "Thailand is one of our most active Marketplace communities." Nevertheless, there is no intention from Facebook to continue expanding it, but there is an increasing number of merchants on the waiting list.

Facebook holds an expectation to use such initiative on gaining more revenue than that from the conventional ways whereby advertisements are only shown in news feed. By this novel method, more advertising videos will be created, attracting more attention to Marketplace and raising brands’ reputation. Facebook is intent on creating a tool correlating with Artificial Intelligence that could assist traders.

Facebook right now is occupied adding things that can be sold in its online market - Marketplace. Both housing rentals and car listings are very much in vogue among Thai people; however, Facebook’s ambitious goal is becoming superior to its competitors, eBay and Craigslist, one day.