facebook for sales

[Charity Newland]

Good Morning,
Does anyone use facebook for taking orders and sales? any advice, worth the trouble or not?
Thanks

[Tim Bateson]

See recent thread: http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthre...aving-Business

[Steven Gray]

I opened an ETSY.com store and announced it on facebook. At ETSY people can see my items for sale and purchase them there. I don't have to set up a merchant account (credit card account) on ETSY since they take care of that part of the transaction. Once a month ETSY will wire funds directly into my bank account. It works pretty smooth. I am informed when a sale occurs and receive the ship to address of the customer plus their address for communications if needed. I have not had any sales from facebook directly, but possibly indirectly I have. It costs something like 20 - 30 cents to list an item for 6 months. Upon a sale, ETSY collects 3% of the purchase price for their service + 3% for their handling of the credit card part of the transaction. So 6% is the cost of a sale and 20-30 cents to list an item. It is a pretty good way to do business.

[Scott Shepherd]

Probably depends what you are selling. The vast majority of our customers aren't Facebook users and either don't use Facebook at all, or certainly don't use Facebook for their buying needs. That's our customers, your customers might be different.

[Chuck Stone]

I find that people don't generally go to Facebook to see ads (no matter how much facebook pushes ads at them)
and tend to resent it. That means if people start seeing too many ads, they'll unfollow, unfriend, block etc.
And facebook is taking away free advertising, and pushing people towards the paid model. That can mean tons
of 'likes' .. except they come from far off places. Click farms. People paid to click 'Like'. Not the best model.
I think the time to use Facebook for advertising was about 5-10 years ago, but not so much now.

I do Etsy too, but have it set up differently. I don't use their Direct Checkout feature, just Paypal. I get a notice
that I've got money and another one with the order details. Same percentages, just immediate payment. The
holiday season brought about 150 orders on Etsy, averaging around $35-40 so it's not too shabby

[Jason Hilton]

I've set up ecwid for a few clients on Facebook. Take a look, they have good direct integration with facebook so you can sell directly on your Facebook page. Added benefit is that it's a hosted store solution, so you can embed product, order, and entire stores on multiple websites and manage the products centrally, so you don't have to maintain multiple listings across different services.