Meta To Shut Down Facebook Live Shopping From October 1 To Focus On Reels

Meta, the parent company of the social media platform Facebook will be closing its Live Shopping service to focus on Reels—Meta’s short video content product featured on Facebook and Instagram.

“From 1 October 2022, you will no longer be able to host any new or scheduled live shopping events on Facebook,” Facebook posted on its business help page.

“As consumers’ viewing behaviours are shifting to short-form video, we are shifting our focus to Reels on Facebook and Instagram, Meta’s short-form video product,” it added.

The social media major said that the users will be able to use Facebook Live to broadcast live events after the October 1 deadline. However, a user won’t be able to create product playlists or tag products in the Facebook Live video.

Meta added that the users looking to engage their followers deeply with products can try tagging the same in Reels on Instagram. However, the social media conglomerate did not clarify whether Facebook Reels will have the same feature or not.

Facebook introduced Live Shopping back in 2018, to allow users to sell products via Facebook’s live streaming feature. The social media platform also charged a small selling fee at the time of checkout. Therefore, the idea was there to monetise the feature back then.

The development comes as Facebook is losing users in India, which is its largest market in the world, at a steady pace and has come under government scrutiny in recent months.

In particular, the social media platform has seen a veritable exodus of female users in India. In an internal report, Meta said that nudity, the Facebook app’s complicated design language, literacy barriers, and lack of appeal were the prime reasons that led to the decline in Facebook’s user growth. However, the biggest factor was the male dominance in India on the platform.

Among Meta’s family of social media platforms, WhatsApp has the most users in India, with 563 Mn active users in November 2021. Facebook had a user base of 447 Mn while Instagram had 390 Mn users in India as of November 2021.

According to Meta’s June 2022 compliance report, it took action on 22.8 Mn content pieces on two of its flagship platforms. The social media major added that most of the content pieces were marked as Spam.

The social media platform has also been at loggerheads with the Indian government, the regulatory authorities and many courts in the country, with its track record of low compliance with legal notices.

In a recent court hearing in the Delhi High Court, Meta said that the Competition Commission of India (CCI) could not investigate the platform in a ‘creeping fashion.’