Facebook’s new Shopping section could spell trouble for Amazon

Whether you’re on your computer or your smartphone, Facebook wants to be the digital hub where you spend most of your time, the nexus where you can access all of the most important parts of the Internet. Using its unparalleled social networking power, Facebook has already started transforming itself into the place where everyone gets their news, and now its using that same power to transform itself into the place where you do all of your online shopping. The company announced earlier this week that it’ll be testing a Shopping section in the coming weeks that it hopes will serve as a place where users can discover, purchase, and share the products they’re interested in.

People have shifted to mobile. It’s the fastest adoption of a communication technology in history, and it’s changing how we connect with each other and discover new things. Businesses, however, are still making the shift. Marketers are challenged to reach their customers and drive sales on mobile. The majority of time spent on mobile is in apps, and people spend the majority of that time in just a handful of apps, including Facebook and Instagram.1 For people, the mobile shopping experience is often difficult to navigate. Customers can experience slow load times and too many steps on the way to checkout. This is bad for people and bad for marketers. On Facebook we’ve seen that people are coming to our platform not only to connect with friends and family but also with products and brands. In fact, a survey suggested that nearly half of people come to Facebook to actively look for products, with a majority of them discovering new products in News Feed, Pages, and Groups. This behavior—that’s already happening on Facebook—gives us a chance to make people and marketers’ experiences better. We want to build native experiences that make it easier for both people to discover products on mobile and businesses to drive more sales. Some of our efforts are fully launched and are already creating value for people and businesses. Others are in early test phases. These tests will evolve as we get more feedback.