Facebook shop

charlies_mum

I had a phone call from someone trying to sell me a Facebook shop. I was in the middle of something so couldn't really listen properly, but I think the gist was that it works like Ebay shops, but I think you pay a one off fee of £149 a year.

Has anyone else had the call, and is it a one off payment with no fees ?

Strapped

charlies_mum wrote: »

I had a phone call from someone trying to sell me a Facebook shop. I was in the middle of something so couldn't really listen properly, but I think the gist was that it works like Ebay shops, but I think you pay a one off fee of £149 a year.

Has anyone else had the call, and is it a one off payment with no fees ?

I've not had the call, but have noticed these springing up. There are also quite a few "swap and sell" pages which I have successfully sold things through (and which didn't cost anything, although I'm sure that FB will soon fix that).

RFW

There's another thread on here about it. Essentially you are paying £149 for something most people can do for nothing.

You can actually link your Facebook and Ebay pages fairly simply for nothing and/or link Facebook to your own website for nothing too.

As far as I can see there is no value in £149 and why this company spend days bombarding Ebay users with cold calling.

zipady_do

Well to be fair if they set you up with an ecommerce ready FB shop then it's not a bad price. The way FB works it'll all be hosted behind the scenes somewhere and pulled through in an iframe though, so it's not like it's some revolutionary technology. It's just setting up a website with a max width of 500 pixels (so it fits into FB pages) and linking it through...

mcjordi

just set up an Open group or a page for people to "like" and sell on that.. thats all the sell/swap sites are on FB!

dont pay for something you can do for nowt anyway..

RFW

zipady_do wrote: »

Well to be fair if they set you up with an ecommerce ready FB shop then it's not a bad price. /QUOTE]
I'm fairly sure they don't, I wouldn't deal with any company that cold calls anyway, but this one (assuming it's the same company I spoke to) seem fairly ill informed sales staff just after a quick buck. Also the ones I spoke to were charging £99, still too much.

sgh1976

Bugle or something have been pestering me for months on this. I have spells where they phone every day for a week.......then 2 weeks of nothing and then back on to it again. Last call I had I did kindly suggested they stop calling me.

Same patter - Loads of ebay sellers are moving to us, £99 blah blah. I say i'm not interested and their tone of voice changes and all of a sudden its as if I have said "well I have just killed you mother"

First phone call I was mildly interested, they soon ended that interest.

RFW

Given that they're still doing it, they must get plenty of takers. On the surface it looks like a pretty good deal, £99 for a shop on Facebook, just that it's a simple thing that anyone can do for nothing.

My general rule is that if someone cold calls me I don't want to know, if I want something I'll research it myself and then find a supplier not wait for someone to call.

Misstress

I have recently set up a selling page, just using the normal page you set up for your own name. I have had great success selling to people in my local area. Obv you still get some timewasters and no shows, but i'm happy with how its going

timmmers

Facebooks shops may seem cheap "ready to go" but when you consider that the company is using a template they already have and that you could have a full ecommerce site up and running with most hosts and linked to a FB page (as all the big companies do) it's not cheap.

What would REALLY put me off :-
Security...FB isn't great with that. Nor are they quick to fix problems with users, or expansive with what they are doing/intend to do in future. It's rellatively easy to mess someone's FB business up if you are a disgruntled user...or be reported etc. Hard to fix quickly.

You pay for a shop, get it up and running, then FB upgrade as they are doing now and are #REALLY going to do soon....and your shop vendor is going to upgrade it to match free and quickly? Can't see that really. You basically have very little control of your own online shop. If it goes wrong, what do you tell a customer, that you're fixing it? You can't ..you're in the hands of FB and whoever sold you that template (who will likely be very busy with ALL their customers). All good web hosts provide Cpanel which includes at least one good shopping cart, templates (which any web designer can customise or fix), and forums etc. as part of a package. You in control...always best.

Google...FB has such a mass of code compared to a normal shopping cart on a website that it won't do well on ranking. FB as an additional way to gain business...that's good but not the core of a real business.

Google_+ are looking much better for this in the future, they are already involved in ecommerce and communicate well.

A hobby sales site, a craft shop or smething may work OK on FB, a real business would be a risk IMO.

There is a book I won recently that I'd recommend to anyone with interest online in a commercial or promotional sense. The Social Media Bible. http://www.thesocialmediabible.com/ it is excellent. I even asked the author a question on twitter a while back and he responded the same day lol

I got out of the website business partly because it became too easy for customers to build their own sites and shops. IF you have a brain and care to take a little time you can easily do a god job yourself