Hidden benefits of Facebook for e-commerce in Malaysia
Malaysia is the largest e-commerce market In Southeast Asia. It has the highest percentage of digital consumers in SEA region, with an even greater potential to grow in the coming years. Facebook for e-commerce, as one of the digital shopping platform, then becomes a great revenue source as more customers are beginning to shop on Facebook.
Facebook and Bain & Co. coined the phrase “Southeast Asia, The Home for Digital Transformation” in their 2021 research. Here are some insightful statistics about Malaysia’s e-commerce market:
88% (22 million people) of consumers in Malaysia are buying online in 2021.
The sectors within the e-commerce market that experienced the most growth is groceries, F&B, and furniture.
Malaysia’s digital spending per capita is up by 47% in 2021 compared to 2020.
When considering which brand to purchase from, online channels pose a stronger influence of 71% vs. 29% for offline channels.
This data reveals that consumers in SEA, particularly Malaysia, value on-demand, convenient, reliable, and secure channels when buying products.
Source: Statista 2022
Considering that the average Malaysian consumer spends more than 3 hours daily, businesses can maximise selling opportunities by engaging customers via popular social media apps, i.e., Facebook and Instagram Shopping, and setting up online storefronts on Lazada and Shopee.
In this blog, we focus on how Facebook’s mobile-first features maximise conversion rates and provide reliable customer support throughout the entire e-commerce journey.
Facebook for e-commerce makes online shopping easy for Malaysians
Facebook advantages for businesses are offered through two key features used to sell faster and manage customer relationships. The first feature is Facebook Shops which was launched in May 2020. The second is Facebook Messenger - one of the world’s most widely used messaging apps with 1.3B MAUs.
Let’s discuss how both of these features respectively smoothen business communication and enhances customer satisfaction.
Why businesses choose to do e-commerce on Facebook Shops
Source: Meta
Since its launch in May 2020, Facebook Shops have been a game-changer in mobile-first in-app shopping experiences. In our current retailing landscape, where many businesses adopt an omnichannel strategy - a retail approach that minimises friction and maximises cross-channel integration - Facebook Shops meets the global consumer demands for a highly personalised and seamless customer journey.
So, what e-commerce features do Facebook Shops include?
Customisable digital storefront to showcase your brand
A strong appeal of Facebook Shops for businesses is its customisability.
Just as you can decorate and design a brick-and-mortar store to attract customers’ attention, Facebook Shops allow you to choose which products to feature, curate collections, select fonts and colours, and decide how your products are displayed.
The advantage of e-commerce on Facebook is that everything is integrated. When you add new products to your shop, customers can be alerted by notifications and view them on their Feed or browse the merchandise directly on the Facebook Shop tab.
For businesses, this all-in-one shopping experience gives you comprehensive analytics, including click rates, engagement, etc., that reveals bottlenecks throughout the sales cycle, which means you can continuously re-strategise ways to market to your audiences.
Head to our blog for The ultimate guide to setting up a Facebook Shop in Malaysia.
E-commerce platform integrations for a truly omnichannel retail strategy
Integrations are key to making omnichannel retailing work.
Facebook Shop integrations are compatible with all major CRM platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, etc. Businesses can manage their orders with ease from a centralised database and synchronise inventories across Facebook Shop and their e-commerce website, whereas customers can purchase products directly within the Facebook browser or app from discovery to checkout.
Promoting products and engaging customers directly through Facebook Live feature
Source: Meta
In Malaysia, a trend accelerated by the pandemic is Livestream shopping on Facebook Live. Brands collaborate with fashion and beauty influencers to host streaming events during holidays or festivals to promote sales. Facebook Live notifies followers through Messenger or Facebook notification when a streaming event commences to bring in traffic and then encourages viewers to engage through comments and reactions.
This marketing tactic is cost-efficient for businesses as new products are promoted to a large audience without production work or set design effort. When integrating Facebook with a powerful social commerce hub like SleekFlow, merchants can utilise automatic reply comments and messaging tools to further boost engagement. The algorithm will also favour the high engagement rates, pushing the campaign on the news feeds of prospective customers.
Never miss a chance to engage customers and understand how SleekFlow’s auto reply feature can help drive conversions.
How to grow e-commerce on Facebook Messenger for businesses
Besides Facebook’s e-commerce platform, another major appeal of Facebook for sellers is Facebook Messenger. After reviewing products on Facebook Shops, customers are bound to have some questions that need to be answered. For example: what other colours do these sneakers come in? How long is shipping going to take? What are the dimensions of this piece of furniture?
As social commerce matures, customers will expect more from businesses to provide reliable, informative, and seamless support throughout the shopping experience. If customers are already spending so much time on Facebook, what better way to engage them than Facebook Messenger?
Reliable Facebook Messenger chatbot to guarantee customer service quality
Facebook Messenger chatbot allows you to automate workflow scenarios from customer service to campaigns to product updates. You can keep your customers connected and informed about your products without spending human resources manually responding to each contact.
Chatbots also can help enhance a more personalised retail experience. Informed by the customer profile and shopping preferences, chatbots can identify which relevant products should be recommended to prospective customers, leading to a much higher conversion rate and saving time for the support team individually gather such data.
Automation tools boost conversation rates in Facebook Messenger for businesses
While the average conversion rate in the e-commerce industry is not impressive at a mere 2.86%, instant messaging has a 14% conversion rate, and Facebook Messenger metrics are even more impressive:
Facebook Messenger Open Rate: 88%
Facebook Messenger Click-through Rate: 56%
Besides the built-in features of Facebook Messenger, businesses can unlock more advanced automation tools by choosing third-party chat commerce solutions such as SleekFlow. These advance tools include birthday offers, anniversary deals, abandoned cart notifications, re-targeting campaigns, etc., to help businesses convert prospects into long-term customers of your brand.
Understand how marketing automation platforms can help your business achieve growth and sell better in our blog.
Seamlessly integrated support for Facebook for e-commerce with Messenger and Shops
The functionality of Facebook Shops and Messenger encompasses a one-stop-shop concept that brings convenience, speed, and reliability to businesses and shoppers. Businesses can easily manage their sales, customer support, and marketing representatives with access to a unified team inbox (SleekFlow pro tip: you can set auto-assign and auto-reply rules to streamline internal workflow and achieve more).
On the other hand, customers do not have to go through the hassle of being redirected to different platforms when shopping on Facebook. Everything from brand discovery, customer support, to checkout is done in-app.
Wondering how to use Facebook Messenger CRM for business? We've got you covered.
The power of Facebook for e-commerce to drive sales in Malaysia
Here are some concrete examples of how businesses in Malaysia use Facebook for e-commerce.
Estée Lauder: reach more of the target market with less effort
Responding to Malaysia’s COVID-19 stay-at-home strategy, global luxury beauty company Estée Lauder partnered with e-commerce marketplace Lazada and used Facebook Collaborative Ads to boost online sales.
On Lazada’s Super Brand Day shopping event, the beauty brand experimented with a new creative strategy in Malaysia. Since their target audience was women, they utilised Facebook’s ad automation tools that enabled the ads to automatically display products people were more likely to purchase based on their Facebook profile activity.
Within the one week of ad launch, the brand achieved 42.5X Super Brand Day return on ad spend from prospecting audiences and 3.9X return on ad spend from remarketing audiences.
D+AF: uncover new international markets and revenue opportunities
D+AF is a Taiwanese shoe retailer that helps women find versatile shoes that match any outfit. As part of their global expansion strategy, the brand wanted to advertise to Asia, Europe and the US while maximising its return on ad spend, so they chose to do e-commerce with Facebook.
Facebook’s solution is to help them run multi-language and multi-country dynamic ads. These dynamic ads automatically converted to the right currencies and languages across targeted markets. This meant that all D+AF had to do was create one consolidated catalogue. Let Facebook’s automation and optimisation tools do the work.
And the localised content paid off. Within two weeks of ad launch, D+AF achieved a 57% higher return on ad spend with multi-language and multi-country dynamic ads than single-market catalogue dynamic ads and a 26% increase in conversion rates.
Kiehl’s: shop with confidence during the festive season
Leading skincare brand Kiehl’s launched an ad campaign during Ramadan to reach Malaysian customers. Kiehl’s opted for Facebook e-commerce to provide a full-funnel shopping journey for customers.
Also, as a response to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in Malaysia, Kiehl’s invited beauty advisors to share skincare and beauty tips that would be useful during Ramadan on Facebook Live. During the streaming event, customers could comment a specific hashtag to express interest in the promoted product, which automatically opened a conversation in Messenger to guide customers to make a purchase.
In this seven-week full-funnel campaign that spanned from ads, Live events, News Feed and Stories posts, the brand experienced an 8X return on ad spend for campaign across Facebook and 59% of online sales were driven by traffic from Facebook and Instagram Shop, Messenger and Instagram Direct Messages.
How to integrate an e-commerce platform with Facebook for businesses
Wondering how your business can also elevate e-commerce with Facebook? Here’s how.
Facebook for WooCommerce: the ultimate e-commerce platform
Go to the Facebook for WooCommerce page on your WordPress to download the extension
Log into your WooCommerce account and open a new tab
Select Plugin in the right menu column and choose Add New
Select Upload Plugin
Click Choose File and click the facebook-for-woocommerce.zip file that you just downloaded
Select Install Now
Select Activate Plugin
Select Marketing and choose Facebook from the dropdown menu
Select Get Started
Verify your status
Shopify Facebook channel: the easiest way to connect with customers
Log into your Shopify account
Install the Facebook channel to connect Meta (includes Instagram Shopping, Facebook Shop, or Facebook Marketing for e-commerce) with Shopify
Add Meta Pixel in your Shopify admin.
For more data sharing, go to Data Sharing Settings and select “Enhanced” or “Maximum” to send data via Conversions API
Facebook extension for Magento: streamlined shopping experience
Install the extension (follow steps 2-8):
Go to your Magento root directory. For example: cd /var/www/html/Magento
To install the extension for the first time, run:
composer require facebook/facebook-for-magento2
To update the extension, run:
composer update facebook/facebook-for-magento2Enable the module:
php bin/magento module:enable Facebook_BusinessExtensionSetup/upgrade the database:
php bin/magento setup:upgradeCompile the Magento app:
php bin/magento setup:di:compileClear the Magento cache:
php bin/magento cache:cleanStart the cron jobs. Run this 3 times:
php bin/magento cron:runAfter installing the extension, connect Magento store to Meta (follow steps 10-14):
Log into your admin panel.
Click the Stores icon in the main menu.
Find the section named Facebook > Setup.
Click on Setup to go to the Extension Installation Page.
Click Get started and follow the onscreen instructions.
Start using Facebook for e-commerce with SleekFlow today
Whether you’re a small business looking to scale to a large business seeking to maximise your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), Facebook e-commerce has a robust set of tools that prove to be worth the investment.
Further bolstered by SleekFlow’s omnichannel social commerce solutions, businesses can complete customer journeys across SMS, live chat, and popular social messaging platforms, including WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram etc.
In addition to our retail O2O solution that is tailored specifically for boosting online-to-offline sales, the following features are key to helping you embrace social commerce potential.
Achieve more on Facebook Messenger for businesses with SleekFlow
Gain access to SleekFlow’s auto reply feature in Facebook comments and chat and boost organic engagement with your customers without having to pay for ads. You can tailor intelligent workflows based on specific scenarios where messages are automatically triggered to enhance your business’ digital presence.
Furthermore, SleekFlow allows you to integrate with Facebook Lead ads to retrieve contact information.
In-chat payment links and product catalogues
1 out of every 5 shoppers will abandon their cart if they find the checkout process too complicated or involves many steps. That’s why SleekFlow enables businesses to send product catalogues and payment links in chat to reduce friction in the customer journey.
All-in-one e-commerce integrations
Businesses can integrate various e-commerce platforms,such as Shopify, Magento, Salesforce Commerce cloud, etc., to SleekFlow. Teams can maximise their productivity as customer data is centralised on a unified platform. The enhanced visibility across various communication channels enables businesses to retarget campaigns more effectively and develop solutions to overcome sales objections.
If your business uses Shopify for e-commerce, SleekFlow’s Shopify integration feature enables agents to draft orders in SleekFlow’s all-in-one inbox and generate a payment link for one-click checkout directly to the customer in chat. Once the customer has paid, the order would automatically a status update as paid on Shopify and in chat. Furthermore, the transaction fee is lower than Meta’s Commerce Manager selling fee. This feature will help you guide your customers from demonstrating interest to checkout seamlessly, increasing your conversion rates on social media immensely.
Interested to learn more? Check out our Shopify X SleekFlow integration and explore its many benefits now.
Interested but don’t know where to start? Consult our localised experts in Malaysia.
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