Facebook to Discontinue its Live Shopping Feature in October
In order to concentrate on reels, Facebook will discontinue its live shopping function in October.
Beginning on October 1, 2022, you won’t be allowed to hold any new or scheduled Live Shopping events on Facebook, according to Meta’s blog. However, you won’t be able to make product playlists or tag products in your Facebook Live broadcasts. You can still use Facebook Live to broadcast live events.
After a number of fruitful experiments, the company introduced lives shopping in August 2020 to simplify online buying and give retailers of all stripes the tools they need to expand their operations.
Through the live shopping events, the platform offered engaging ways for shops to market their goods, develop deeper connections with viewers, and perhaps even attract new clients.
Retailers will no longer be able to host upcoming or planned live shopping events on Facebook. Instead, the dominant social network will concentrate on reels, a short-form video service offered by meta and accessible on both Facebook and Instagram.
According to Meta, “We are changing our attention to Reels on Facebook and Instagram, Meta’s short-form video offering, as customers’ watching behaviors, are transitioning to short-form video.”
Despite the fact that e-commerce businesses can no longer make product playlists or tag products, the Facebook live feature will still be accessible. You must look for other ways to sell things on the app, such as buying display advertisements or tagging products in Reels on Instagram to enable deeper discovery and consideration, if you want to reach and engage people through videos without relying on Reels and Reels ads on Facebook and Instagram.
According to Meta, “You can set up Live Shopping on Instagram if you have a business with checkout and want to hold Live Shopping events there.”
Notably, Facebook is not the only social media application that will no longer support live shopping. According to TechCrunch, TikTok recently abandoned its plans to expand its live-e-commerce shop operation in the US and several regions of Europe.
