Meta to Ax Facebook Live Shopping, Push Sellers to Reels

Facebook Live Shopping is the latest casualty of Meta’s move to short-form video.

The feature—a kind of modern home shopping network—allows business owners to showcase and sell products in live video, answering questions and receiving real-time feedback.

But Meta he says now(Opens in a new window) “Consumer viewing behaviors are shifting to short-form video,” so it’s removing shoppable live streams on its main social network and encouraging marketers to experiment with Reels and Reels ads on Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook users can still host live videos, they just won’t be able to “create product playlists or tag products” during the stream, starting October 1st.

Live shopping on Instagram(Opens in a new window) will continue, allowing presenters to tag up to 30 products in Reels. Businesses with checkout-enabled stores, meanwhile, can partner with other creators and schedule a broadcast from an hour to three months in advance.

The news comes shortly after Instagram made a shift to full-screen TikTok-like videos and feeds full of content from random accounts after a while high profile(Opens in a new window) review.

Just don’t expect video to give up: Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has promised a continued emphasis on Reels—starting with a test to automatically turns video posts into reels(Opens in a new window), as well as new standards that make it easier to record and share 90-second clips. Mosseri is also said to be temporarily relocating to London to work with the UK team in efforts to compete with TikTok and embrace the metaverse. The Financial Times References(Opens in a new window).

In April, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Instagram users they spend 20% of their time(Opens in a new window) in the app by watching Reels. Ironically, many of these are likely reposted TikToks, which the company aims to control by ranking videos for originality (ie those not created on a rival platform).