Facebook and Shopify

[jekram]

@ImranBinShoukat @sojharo

Today Facebook and Shopify announced working together. Basically instead of going to Amazon to buy. Now you can advertise of FB and Buy of FB. Please read the press release and watch the Video. It is available on FB and Instagram. There will other stores on FB besides Shopify.

My ask is for you to read and watch this and see how KiboPush can take advantage of it.

Let's discuss this in 2 weeks.

FB is calling it Shop.

Here are the two articles.

1. https://news.shopify.com/shopify-partners-with-facebook-to-help-businesses-launch-branded-facebook-shops

There is a video in it also.

2. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21263567/facebook-shops-instagram-shopping-e-commerce-small-business-loyalty-program

We are uniquely positioned to take advantage of it.

[sojharo]

I have gone through both articles and video. From articles, it is evident that eventually, Facebook is also going to support shops inside the Messenger as well. For now, they are talking about Facebook Pages Shops and Instagram Shops.

Facebook shops individually is a separate feature and it can be used alone. We can either create shops solely on Facebook or connect our existing shops from shopify, woocommerce etc, mainly from shopify.

That means there are two types of stores for us.

1. Those stores which are on solely on Facebook Pages
2. Those stores which are on Shopify and have integrated with Facebook Pages

The shops on shopify will handle the order management and payment on their platforms. And shops on Facebook Pages will handle their checkouts and order management on Facebook.

Here is how we can create a Facebook Page with shops type: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/912190892201033?id=206236483305742

We already know how to create stores on shopify and have created few sample stores for our shopify integration.

We have already done integration with shopify api and kibopush.

Integrations and workflows

1. Shopify Store and Facebook Page Integration: For this, we have already done integration using shopify api with kibopush, here we are able to send order updates from shopify to messenger. We can enhance it further to support features such as show items from shopify on messenger. One thing, that we found in articles was that merchants will be able to do chat with their customers while they are purchasing. Once any shopify customer integrates with kibopush, he/she can use our kibochat feature on his page which has more features than Facebook's existing Page Inbox. We need to discuss more here to understand what other use cases will be there when merchants starts using facebook platform. For this, we need to create such sample pages to understand more.
2. KiboPush integration with Instagram stores and Facebook Page Stores: This is something new and we have already discussed about it previously when we were exploring Facebook MarketPlace API. Now, Facebook is unifying marketplace, Facebook Shops and Instagram Shops into single API called Commerce Platform. This is a graph api by Facebook and we need to start learning and experimenting on this.

Commerce Platform by Facebook

It is an API from Facebook which unifies Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Shops and Instagram Shops. With this, we will be able to manage those stores which are maintaining their inventories, orders and everything on facebook. In Facebook's own words:

The Commerce Platform enables e-commerce solutions and retailers to deeply integrate their infrastructure with the tools available to sell their products across the Facebook Family of apps, including Page Shop, Marketplace and Instagram Shopping.

Powered by the Graph API, it allows them to build a merchant onboarding experience, catalog management and order management flows.

We need to understand this commerce platform in detail.

Here is the link: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/commerce-platform

I have looked into it on high level and looks like they will update it to support this new announcement. In their new announcement, they are saying customer support will be done using live chat but in this api, they are saying customer support should be done using email.

Action Items

1. We should create a new test Facebook page with type Shop.
2. We should create a new test Instagram account with type Shop.
3. We should read and understand the Commerce Platform (API by facebook)
4. We should use commerce platform api and test its integration with kibopush
5. We should think further on how we can improve our existing integration with shopify
6. On shopify, we have a competitor called octane.ai and they just do Messenger and Shopify integration. We need to see what they are doing.

Please share more thoughts and if any action item is missing above.

[ImranBinShoukat]

I have also gone through the articles and video. I agree with @sojharo we should start with above action items. Later we may come up with more actions or next steps. But we can not start working on first two items yet as Facebook says that Shops will be available to people in next few months. So, right now they are available for all.

[jekram]

Thanks @sojharo and @ImranBinShoukat

Let's discuss this in the status meeting

1. I would like you to explore more on the AI was in around 14 mins. Where Mark was talking "our AI personalization experience" can we explore this more and incorporate it our Chatbot to more personalized Chatbot"

Look like we would have access to: Product Catalog "Before people can buy products in your Facebook Shop or Instagram Shopping account, you need to upload them in a Facebook Products Catalog. Product Catalogs are managed in Catalog Manager."

2. In our current integration do make the customer get the subscription to Messenger"

[sojharo]

I was not able to work on this issue today as most of my time was gone to these issues:

• FlockSend API review - Whatsapp vendor #8987 (done)
• Worked with Adil on mailchimp bounce rate warning (resolved the issue, removed email addresses which got bounced, created a free mailchimp account)
• Compute bot analytics server work #8881 (fixed the sent message count problem, testing required)

[sojharo]

I have watched the Mark Zuckerberg's video from AI point of view.

AI features for personalised shopping experiences:

1. Automatically identify and tag products in photos
2. Personalise shop depending on who is visiting i.e. a man should be shown male clothing on shop
3. Augmented Reality so customers can see how a product will look on them or in their house

1. Automatically identify and tag products in photos

This is using some technology similar to open computer vision. Facebook has already built and matured their picture tag feature which recognizes the faces of people in photos. They will use similar feature of them in product images uploaded by store owners on facebook shop pages. They will also do categorisation of the products offered by store on automatic basis so that they can appear on facebook or instagram search as well.

Here is the api list which contains open source tool to detect objects. https://ai.facebook.com/tools/#libraries-models-and-datasets

https://research.fb.com/downloads/detectron/

2. Personalise shop depending on who is visiting i.e. a man should be shown male clothing on shop

This is similar to what other ecommerce platforms already have. Depending on previous purchase or who the buyer is, they will show the personalised shop page to them. This is something we may do in future when someone says on "messenger please show me shirts", we can fetch some personalisation information regarding that buyer from facebook and then show the products from shopify or facebook accordingly.

3. Augmented Reality so customers can see how a product will look on them or in their house

They are already doing this on messenger and I had seen one facebook page which was showing products in augmented reality environment where we were able to open camera inside messenger and they showed how the product will look on you. Not many facebook pages are doing this for now. But they have an api available for this. Buyers on kibopush may want to setup their bot in a way that it should send augmented reality environment for certain products to customers.

Here is their API for this: https://developers.facebook.com/products/#arvr

Further discussion:

They have open ecosystem i.e. shop owners decide on what level they want to go online. There are following levels:

1. Discovery
2. Consideration
3. Checkout
4. Shipping and Logistics
5. Customer Support

These will be all tools provided by facebook and it is upto owners to decide which of them they want to use.

If store owner already has shopify store, then on integration with facebook, all of the products will be copied to facebook catalog for that business page.

At one point, he states that this commerce platform will soon be available on messenger and whatsapp as well. For now, it is on Facebook Pages and Instagram.

[sojharo]

As a next step, I worked on this and read up on Commerce API and also tried creating facebook page shop and instagram shop account.

1. I was able to create a facebook page shop and add products to it. It showed that products will be reviewed first. However, after adding them, it is not showing that they are in review and when I click on my products, it shows marketplace is not available to you:

2. On Instagram, I tried very hard but I was not able to see option for converting an account to shop account on Instagram.

On creating facebook shop page, it asked me following questions about my checkout methods and currency:

I think maybe my page is under review therefore it is showing me not eligible. I will wait and once it is approved, I will then try to connect this page with instagram, maybe after that I am able to create instagram shop account.

I also started reading on API. Today, I will try to write sample code to test the API.

[sojharo]

As per our discussion in meeting, the feature is only available for USA, so we will put hold on this issue. I am deferring it.