Our Facebook page is up and running for well over a year now and we’re delighted to have build up a following of over 1000 fans or people who “like” the page . The page is a fun and informative way to “chat” to our existing and potential customers. We regularly run competitions, offers, discounts and post articles and links. Our Facebook fans can post their own reviews and often send us photos of the kids in their PuddleDucks gear. We love it. Overall, Facebook is definitely our social media channel of choice.
As an online retailer we are always interested in finding new ways to show off and sell our products. I recently read a piece in Practical Ecommerce about different ways of selling your products from your Facebook page. I feel it is too early and currently too unsecure to sell directly on the Facebook page but I do feel that there is a great opportunity to “show off your wares” to your Facebook fans and route them through to your website. After doing a bit of reaseach I selected Shop Tab as the Facebook application we would use.
When installed it shows your products on a new “Shop” tab on your page. Clicking on a products takes the customer to the appropriate page on the website where the secure purchase can (hopefully!) take place.
The installation of the application is really easy. The pricing plan I selected included a free 7 day trial and a charge of $10 per month after that. You just sign up through Facebook, add your page details and then upload a CSV file of your products to ShopTab. The format of this file is defined by Shop Tab and it includes, Product Name, Description, Category, Price, Product url and Image url. Upload the file and the products appear on a new Shop tab on your Facebook page.
So far, I have only included a subset of our products on the Shop tab. More will be added more as we go along. I will also be keeping a close eye on Google Analytics to see how much extra traffic comes from our new Facebook shop window.
PuddleDucks Blog 
Seán Kirwan said
Nice post.
We’ve had a good few customers getting strong sales leads through facebook. I’d be very interested to see how the traffic shows up in Google Analytics – does it just indicate Facebook traffic or if it gives specific information from Shoptab.
I’ll follow your progress with interest.
Seán Kirwan
Bang Ecommerce
puddleducks said
Hi Seán,
Thanks for the comment. It looks at the moment that Google Analytics just shows Facebook traffic as a whole but I’ll investigate and see if there is a way to see the “Shop Tab” Facebook traffic in isolation from the rest. I’ll update the post/comments when I find out more.
Aedan
Tom Murphy said
Nice read
We currently have over 5,500 fans on our facebook page. We generate a lot of hits to the site however we haven’t been able to get as much sales as we’d like from them. Every now and then we have been posting products on FB. We also added some of the shirts into an album, that didn’t work too well though.
That ‘Shop Tab’ looks very impressive. I saw you own one on FB. I was just wondering has it turned out useful for you cause we are considering applying it?
puddleducks said
Hi Tom — Well done on your Facebook page and on the number of fans. From our point of view ShopTab is an added extra to our main selling channel and may generate a small amount of sales through Facebook fans clicking through to our retail website. But it’s never going to be a huge generator of sales (never say never?). The vast majority of our traffic comes through Google – people searching and buying online. ShopTab is easy to implement and doesn’t cost too much so the outlay is low. But IMHO don’t expect a huge amount of sales from it. You could just list your special offers/new arrivals on it, rather than your complete range?
If you’d like to discuss further please drop me a line at aedan@puddleducks.ie
All the best — Aedan
Seán Kirwan said
Hi Tom,
It might be worth looking at what your posting up there. We’ve seen good sales from facebook from a number of our clients when they’ve used promotion codes exclusively for facebook fans. For example 5% all sales on this product until midnight Sat using this code exclusively for facebook.
Seán