Facebook is already replete with ads and other features tailored towards facilitating safe shopping online, but this week it has announced the rollout of a new capability that should appeal to brands and retailers hoping to sell goods to its billions of users.

Simply known as ‘Shop’, the service is particularly targeted at catering to small businesses that are turning to the internet in droves at the moment in order to connect with customers who cannot visit bricks and mortar stores as a result of the pandemic.

In essence, Shop will act as a marketplace where lots of different retailers and brands can vie for the attention of users while also giving them the benefit of integration with Instagram’s parallel e-commerce features at the same time.

Making a single unified ecosystem for selling products on two of the world’s biggest social networking platforms definitely makes sense, both from a business and user perspective.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke out about the intentions behind this announcement, arguing that it should not just be the biggest corporations that can make the most out of the e-commerce tools that are available today but also the up and coming companies looking to get a foothold in the market.

From Facebook’s perspective, being able to provide more shopping tools to users will mean that it is also able to sell more ads and generate additional revenue by focusing e-commerce activity within its own app rather than seeing people click through to other sites to complete purchases.

It has already successfully added shopping features to Instagram, with the photo-focused nature of that app giving brands the opportunity to boost customer engagement. If it pulls off a similar trick with Facebook, then it could really capitalise on the current trend for increased online spending.