FB, Insta to soon mandate checkout experience on Shops

SAN FRANCISCO: Meta (formerly Facebook) has announced that it will be phasing out the onboarding of new Shops without checkout on Facebook and Instagram enabled.

"Beginning April 24 of next year, Shops without checkout on Facebook and Instagram enabled will no longer be accessible," Meta said in a blogpost on Thursday.

This means that the shops that direct people to an e-commerce site to complete a purchase, rather than allowing people to make a purchase directly through Facebook or Instagram, or shops with checkout on messaging, will no longer be accessible in the US.

However, the company said that the businesses located in these 21 international markets -- Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, the UK and Ukraine, will continue to be able to use Facebook and Instagram shops without checkout enabled until further notice.

These changes suggest that Meta is placing a greater emphasis on its checkout experience, with a focus on becoming the exclusive provider of checkout services for both Instagram and Facebook Shops.

Moreover, the company announced that some businesses without checkout-enabled Shops on Facebook and Instagram will no longer be able to tag their products via the Content Publishing API, beginning August 10, 2023.

This will impact both API and native interfaces and will remove tags to products from previous posts.

In addition, Meta has announced that as of June 5, 2023, Facebook pages that have not been updated to the new Pages experience will be automatically updated.

However, this update will no longer support certain old features, such as the ability to manage and post a catalogue or product details page from a Facebook Page. Despite this, businesses will still be able to share links to their website.

Facebook and Instagram launched their Shops feature in 2020 to enable users to purchase products directly from a business's page.

The company has now announced a new change, positioning it as part of its broader goal to create a seamless shopping experience that benefits both users and businesses.