Facebook is gradually rolling out its new Shops for Facebook and Instagram to more regions, and giving more businesses the capacity to sell direct on Facebook via simplified, customized shop options which maximize both presentation and performance.

And if you’re looking to open up your own Facebook shop, this could help – Facebook recently added a new Blueprint education overview on how to set up a Facebook Shop, which could help you get everything prepared for when the option eventually becomes available for your Page.

Here’s an overview of the process:

First off, businesses that want to open a Facebook or Instagram shop need to add their inventory via Commerce Manager, which you can access here.

In order to qualify for Commerce Manager, businesses need to provide Facebook with the following info:

• Your physical business address and email address (for tax purposes)

• The category that best describes your business, and your business type and name, for identity verification.

• A Federal Tax Identification Number that matches your legal name, for IRS reporting (US only).

• A State Tax Registration Number for every state where you do business, for financial reports (US only).

• Your bank account info to get your payouts (US only).

• The name, social security number and date of birth of your business representative, for identity verification (US only).

• Your shipping options, return policy and customer service email (if eligible for checkout).

As you can some, some of these requirements will vary by region, but you’ll need to provide most of this info in all markets in order to qualify for Commerce Manager.

Once you’re ready to go, you’ll then need to go through the set-up process and upload your inventory list (here’s an overview of the Commerce Manager set-up process).

Commerce Manager is where you’ll manage all of your sales processes, so it’s a crucial step in building your Facebook Shop. 

From there, and with all of your products now loaded into Facebook’s system, you can move onto the next stage, which is customizing how your Facebook/Instagram shop will look.

Click on the ‘Customize Your Shop’ button and you move on to Facebook’s Shop Builder dashboard.

As you can see here, the new Shop Builder set up provides you with a range of visual options, enabling you to create Collections of associated products, update the style and layout of your item displays, and also see how your listings will look on both Facebook and Instagram.

This is the key update of the new Facebook Shops process – Pages have been able to sell products on Facebook for some time, but this new system enables Pages to put more emphasis on their Shops, and to better manage how their items are displayed to visitors.

The new process will, eventually, be made available to all Pages, with Facebook sending out notifications to eligible businesses as it continues to expand availability. And definitely, it’ll be an appealing option – but there is some set-up required, you do need to go through some key steps in order to build your Facebook shop.

As such, now might be the perfect time to get started – you can begin with Commerce Manager now, ahead of the full Shops rollout, which could make it easier to get your business established and ready to sell in both apps.

You can read more about the new Facebook Shops process here.