Facebook & Shopify Are Expanding Their Buy Button Testing

Remember the Facebook Buy button? Amid recent news of Pinterest and Google joining the ecommerce land rush, you could be excused for wondering what happened to the social network’s own in-stream commerce effort.

That experiment, launched last July and limited to a small number of merchants, is still in beta. But starting today it will be tested with more merchants. Ecommerce platform Shopify announced that it is offering access to the Buy button to a bigger group of its U.S. clients.

Shopify, which also is a partner in Pinterest’s Buyable Pins that are due later this month, already had several clients using the Facebook Buy button. Now it has created a Facebook sales channel within its dashboard and is giving selected merchants invites to the expanded test. Shopify is also taking requests to join the test. Businesses will be able to post Buy buttons, promote the posts with paid Facebook ads and manage the orders from Facebook.

“We help our merchants connect to their customers, wherever that may be,” Shopify director of product Satish Kanwar said in a statement. “As Facebook is one of the highest drivers of traffic to all Shopify stores, we’re excited to offer it as a channel.”

Facebook gave no indication of when to expect a full rollout of the Buy button, but a spokesperson said via email that the Shopify data “will help us understand how the feature can drive sales for a wider variety of merchants.”