A Facebook Shop represents an invaluable sales channel for your business. Maintaining one allows you to reach your audience where they spend most of their time, enabling them to purchase products directly through their social network of choice.
In other words, it allows you to directly leverage your brand’s social presence to drive more sales.
Like any marketplace, however, Facebook Shops doesn’t come without certain caveats. The platform requires a certain degree of technical capability where order management is concerned. And its help documentation isn’t always clear on what’s required for a seller.
Getting approved to sell on the platform is a process in and of itself. You need to submit comprehensive documentation to Facebook on everything from your business details and your banking information to your customer service and return policies. Once you’re approved to sell, next comes dealing with Facebook Shop Order Management.
Let’s dive into the ways you can scale your Instagram and Facebook Shop order management processes.
Why You Need a Third-Party Facebook/Instagram Shop Order Management Solution
For brands, the order management process is tedious and time-consuming. If you’re managing fewer than fifty orders a month only on Facebook, or plan to sell via only a single brand, you can probably deal with all of this manually.
Here’s what the typical order management process looks like for individual and bulk orders:
Using Facebook Shop for Individual Orders
- After being notified that a purchase has been made, open Facebook Commerce Manager, Select Orders, then Select “Waiting to be Shipped”.
- Once the order has been shipped, follow the same process again, and mark the order as shipped.
- If there is a single item or multiple items sent in a single shipment, check Mark All Items as Shipped. Otherwise, note the quantity of each item included in each shipment.
- Select the shipping carrier and provide tracking information for the order to Facebook.
- Provide the fulfillment location to Facebook so it can calculate sales tax.
- Select Review Shipment, and make sure all information is accurate.
Using Facebook Shop for Bulk Orders
- Select Manage Orders in Bulk from the Orders Tab.
- Select Export Orders.
- Choose a date range, select Orders that can be fulfilled, then Export File. This will download a CSV file of your orders.
- Open the CSV file.
- Fill out the information on quantity, shipping carrier, tracking numbers, and (optionally) location, then save the file.
- Import the edited CSV file back into Commerce Manager.
As you might expect, the higher your sales volume, the more untenable your Facebook Shop order management becomes.
And the order management isn’t even the most time-consuming thing you’ll have to deal with, either. That honor goes to Facebook’s process for managing product returns, particularly when it comes to adjusting the taxes paid on a return.
Scaling sales and growth requires automation to eliminate manual processes from your workflows, especially if you want to capitalize on growth opportunities through the dynamic Facebook and Instagram Shop channels. That’s where the right order management platform comes into play.
With effective automation, you can reduce the technical burden required to integrate Facebook Shop, automate tax adjustments for product returns, and scale growth across multiple brand pages & shops — all in one location.
That’s countless hours saved, fewer mistakes, and more efficient workflows.
Move Fast With a Third-Party Facebook Shop Solution
Third-party Facebook Shop order management tools are fully supported by Facebook. Simply put, you can — and in many cases, should — work with an external vendor.
The benefit? It will significantly reduce your workload and make it much easier for your business (or businesses) to scale.
Once you are approved to sell on Facebook Shops, you can start working with the tool right away. Highstreet.io supports the Instagram and Facebook Shop order management fulfillment process, so you don’t have to.
Here Is how it works:
Highstreet.io integrates directly with Facebook Commerce, automatically populating order information and considerably streamlining the return process.
More importantly, if you plan to sell under multiple brands, you can manage all of them via a single page, creating unique order management flows for each page ID. In other words, you can manage larger order quantities, scale more effectively, and more efficiently deal with returns and taxes — in addition to gleaning deep insights through performance metrics and selling in multiple markets.
Dive deeper into social commerce and overcome your Facebook Shop order management issues with Highstreet.io.