Facebook tests new shopping section; challenges Amazon

While the new option does not yet have buy buttons to make the shopping experience more seamless, the feature will allow shoppers to browse retailers’ catalogs within Facebook, instead of having to load the retailer’s website in a mobile browser.

There is very rare number of users, who prefers to use mobile phone to make online purchase due to a complex process, and Facebook Inc (FB) wants to win more ad dollars, by making the process very smoothing for users.

Facebook has been testing all kinds of ways to get people to buy stuff on its platform, and it added yet another coal to the fire on Monday, October 12, 2015.

The company has already tested a “buy now” button in articles in the news feed; now, Facebook is testing a “shop” section as an additional tab, along with news feed, pages and groups.

Facebook will also create a central hub on its network for users to shop for products.

Facebook is also updating its carousel ads that rolled out a year ago.

An example of a Target ad users can click on to browse through and purchase products.

So, in order to drive up its video numbers even further, Facebook announced on Tuesday that it is going to give creators, and viewers, a dedicated feed where they can exclusively watch video, much like it did with shopping earlier this week. Additionally, the post says a dedicated Shopping Feed is in the works: “In the coming weeks we’ll begin testing a single place for people to more easily discover, share and purchase products”.

Emphasis is placed on content discovery, Facebook can leverage the data it has on users to provide suggestions about videos that they would like the most, enabling it to effectively compete with YouTube. “This is bad for people and bad for marketers”, the blog post explained.

“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”, the firm said.

One of the latest feature set to include are ads that take a user through a specific brand’s products without redirecting them to another site.