The ultimate guide to setting up a Facebook Shop in Malaysia
Facebook Shop isn’t a new concept, and if you have a Facebook Business Page, you probably would have received prompts to start selling your products or services on Facebook Shop.
As of 2022, there are 21.7 million Facebook users in Malaysia, accounting for more than half of the population nationwide. While a Facebook Business profile can get you the exposure needed, it may not necessarily yield the ultimate goal of increasing sales directly. On the other hand, Facebook Shop serves this purpose by allowing people to buy directly on Facebook.
Learn more about promoting your business on Facebook.
What to consider before setting up a Facebook shop in Malaysia
Facebook Shops are designed for businesses to sell directly on the platform. Once your Facebook Page visitors notice a product they are interested in, they can find it in your Facebook Shop to make a purchase immediately. By having a Facebook Shop, you can:
Introduce your brand’s collections
Demonstrate the trustworthiness of your business
Increase conversions and shopping cart size
Direct more traffic to your website
Get valuable performance insights
If any of the above benefits align with your business goals, and you’re willing to invest a little time to drive more conversions, simply ensure that your business meets the few requirements below.
Facebook Shop eligibility requirements
Before starting your Facebook Shop, it is crucial that you go through the commerce eligibility requirements set by Facebook. Let’s look at the five simple requirements we’ve summarised for you!
1. Complying with Facebook policies
Facebook’s Terms of Service are created to ensure that users behave responsibly. It also makes sure that users allow them to use their personal data to show personalised ads according to interests. Since Facebook is free to use, its funds can only be sourced from organisations that pay to display ads and attract customers.
The Commercial Terms, on the other hand, is for businesses or those using Facebook for commercial purpose. You must grant Facebook permission to use the content you post, comply with all laws, avoid collecting sensitive personal data and release Facebook or Meta from any liability for damages, claims, etc.
Facebook has also written a list of Community Standards that people must follow when expressing their voices and opinions freely.
Authenticity: to use real and authentic content without misrepresentation
Safety: content that can possibly induce any risks of harm or threats will be removed
Privacy: protections of personal privacy and information
Dignity: equality in terms of dignity, no harassment or degradation
Other than the above, policies such as the Merchant Agreement, Commerce Policies, Ads Policies, Pages, Groups, and Events Policies need to be followed to avoid losing access to your account.
As long as you do not include violence, scam, or other similar misbehaviour in your content and do not engage in businesses such as gambling, drug, and alcohol, there generally won’t be any issues.
2. Representing your business website and domain
To determine the authenticity of your business and make Facebook a safe shopping environment, your brand must have a legit product listing in which items can be purchased directly from your website. Listings must not promote the trade of fake documents, currency, financial instruments and virtual currency. Complete the domain verification to prove that it belongs to your business.
3. Be located in a market supported by Facebook
Malaysia is definitely listed as one of the supported regions for Facebook Shops. So, you can skip this and move on to the next required step!
4. Demonstrate trustworthiness as a Malaysian business
Your professional brand account must have an established presence and a sufficient number of followers to demonstrate trustworthiness. All you have to do is post regularly and maintain your account with consistent activity. As you gain more followers and engage them in your regular postings, there is no reason for your Facebook Shop request to be rejected.
No time to manage your Facebook Business account? Learn more about engaging followers and maintaining account activity with automated comment replies.
5. Provide accurate and honest information
Be a company that carries honesty and transparency. Show accurate pricing and return/refund policies on your account on the e-commerce site.
Facebook Shop checkout methods
After meeting the prerequisites above, the next thing you’ll have to decide is where you want your customers to check out their orders. It’ll be best to think from the perspective of your customers when considering the following three main methods:
1. Direct to the message inbox
According to research done by the Baymard Institute, a 35.26% increase in conversion rate, which can translate to thousands or billions of recovered orders, can be acquired if the checkout flow and design are optimised.
In other words, if the customers do not need to visit an e-commerce site to register an account or encounter issues such as a crashed website, they are much less likely to abandon their purchase carts. Therefore, to create a smooth, frictionless experience, you can direct your customers to the message inbox where you can chat and sell.
When customers can continue their journey down the purchase funnel without switching apps, the process can be faster, easier, and more efficient. From automated FAQs to assigning a specific sales agent to talk to this prospective customer, businesses can ensure that the order is completed smoothly and coherently.
Also, the moment the customer confirms the items to be purchased, you can simply generate a quick payment link for them to pay instantly in the chat. And once the payment has been made, the paid order will be automatically created and recorded in your Shopify store through the native integration.
Not only that this will boost conversions from leads generated on Facebook, but it will also encourage impulse buyers to add more items to their cart, all because of convenience.
66% of consumers are willing to pay more for a convenient shopping experience. - Smart Insights
2. Direct to your e-commerce website
In our highly digitalised world today, most businesses sell through both physical shops and online stores. From your Facebook Shop, you can attract customers with promotional campaigns and direct those highly interested in your products to check out on your e-commerce website.
For example, you can invite an influencer to promote your products on Facebook Live and encourage them to shop at your website. All they have to do is drop a comment under the live stream video to receive an automatic reply and/or message in their inbox to get the promo code. Following that, the algorithm will push this campaign, which is generating a high engagement rate for your Facebook Business account, to an even wider audience online, other than driving relevant traffic to your business site to increase conversions.
Check out how businesses in Malaysia do e-commerce with Facebook.
3. Facebook checkout
Although a direct checkout on Facebook is one of the easiest ways for consumers, this feature is, unfortunately, unavailable in Malaysia. Furthermore, the transaction fee charged is rather pricey and less practical, especially for small to medium businesses. Hence, as of now, directing customers to the message inbox is the most accessible way for Malaysian brands.
We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. - Mark Zuckerberg
How to set up a Facebook shop for your business in Malaysia
Image from Facebook
Learning how to create a shop on your Facebook page can be tedious. However, once you follow through with the steps, the exposure will bring in more sales, and the effort will be worth it.
Step 1: Own your Facebook Business Page and catalogue
If you're one of the many sellers who already have a Facebook Business page, you might be thinking, how to make my Facebook page a shop? Well, it's simple.
Just make sure that you have admin access to your Facebook Business Page and catalogue. You can change the settings in your Business Manager account. If you have yet to open a Facebook Business Page or a catalogue, you can also create both of them in the next step.
Step 2: Create your shop in Commerce Manager
Visit the ‘Create your shop’ page and choose Facebook as your channel in the middle of the page.
Choose the checkout method and select the Facebook Business Page you want to sell on. If you do not have a Facebook Page, create one.
Select a Business Manager account or create a new one for this business.
Select the product catalogue you’d like to use for this shop. Please choose carefully as you will not be able to change the catalogue later.
If you have not set up a catalogue, you will not see this step. Instead, a catalogue will be automatically created for you in Commerce Manager. You may add items to the catalogue named ‘Items for [Page name]’ after you finish setting up the Facebook Shop.
5. Review the details of your shop, agree to the ‘Seller Agreement’ and click ‘Finish Setup’.
Step 3: Customise the details of your shop
Now that you have a Facebook Shop for your business, you can go ahead and customise the details, such as
Items in your catalogue
Special collection consisting of featured products
The outlook and design of your shop
After completing all of the steps above, remember to publish your shop so your brand can get discovered by the general public on Facebook!
Facebook Shops vs Facebook Page Shops vs Facebook Marketplace
Selling on Facebook is not difficult at all, but mastering its strategies requires an in-depth understanding of the various pathways made available on Facebook. For example, there are three main types of sales channels on Facebook for merchants to learn and explore. Other than Facebook Shops explained above, there are also Facebook Page Shops and Facebook Marketplace. Let’s take a look at some of the main differences.
Generally, there is not much difference between Facebook Page Shop and Facebook Shop, as both involve selling products of your brand using a professional business profile.
However, as Facebook Shop is launched later than Facebook Page Shop, it does offer more flexibility in terms of managing the store’s design. Therefore, Facebook merchants can go ahead and opt to start a Facebook Shop right away according to the instructions in the above section.
Also, since there are no restrictions or fees on both Facebook Shops and Facebook Marketplace, sellers can offer their products through both of these methods to reach out to a larger audience and boost conversions from there.
Related readings:
73% of sales professionals utilise tech tools to drive sales revenue, and 65% of top-performing sales representatives strive to equip themselves with technological innovations. - LinkedIn research.
Get more leads and sell more products on Facebook with SleekFlow
Generating qualified leads and increasing sales revenue need hard work, but business owners must learn to work smart. Instead of dedicating all of your time and effort rigidly to selling across all channels separately, competing against time with the lack of manpower, leveraging tools is essential to transform into the best-performing brand in the industry.
A tool like SleekFlow, for example, helps businesses ensure that engagement and activity on various social channels, including Facebook, are well-managed. The retail and O2O, and e-commerce solutions tailored based on market research include features such as powerful comment auto replies, Facebook Lead Ad integration, customer data collection and more which are all available for use in the free plan.
Find out more about the notable benefits of using Facebook with SleekFlow.
Other than that, when using SleekFlow, omnichannel retailing can also be conducted efficiently as companies will be able to access all messages from different popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram and more all within one inbox. There are also analytics and metrics from campaigns where actionable insights can be used to retarget effectively, plan future marketing strategies, and evaluate the efficiency of current tactics.
Retail selling is all about communication. The messaging data generated by SleekFlow is critical for us to drive lasting sales performance.
Yonnie Wong
Senior Marketing Manager of bossini
Find out how Bossini gained winning campaign results with an 80% open rate for their promotional messages.
With automation and so many functional features available on SleekFlow, the extra time can then be utilised to plan your business expansion or communicate with business partners, so why waste time on that? Just let technology do its job!
Bonus: powerful integrations for Facebook Shop
Did you know that plenty of integrations with Facebook Shop can make your life much easier when managing your online business?
If you want to integrate WooCommerce with Facebook Shop but think that the plugins are too troublesome to handle, you can choose to integrate your online store with Facebook Messenger on SleekFlow instead. You only need to click one simple 'Add' button and continue with some easy steps.
There's also the native Shopify integration for you to connect Shopify to Facebook Shop. Customers redirected to Facebook Messenger can purchase your products from the Shopify store directly and get recorded as conversions as deals are closed.
Moreover, to power up social commerce and increase sales through Facebook, you can even add a payment method to Facebook Shop using our Stripe integration.
All you need to do is to redirect your customers to the Facebook messaging channel and send them a link to get paid instantly!
Interested but don’t know where to start? Consult our localised experts in Malaysia.
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