Meta Needs To Solve Its Tiktok Problem Prior to Scaling Meta Commerce

A recently leaked memo from Meta highlights their eCommerce ambitions, and it reads somewhat like strategic comedy of errors. Here are a few quotes from the "reports on the report"

"We need to make progress against our vision of our apps being a primary destination for commerce."

> OK. You want to compete with Amazon but you are not saying that explicitly - instead the discussion is about Shopify. Not a great sign you understand the real consumer landscape here.

"Our offsite ecosystem remains critically important, not least because we will have US offsite sellers that decide never to upgrade to onsite and a large international presence of offsite Shops for quite some time,"

>So to Facebook the world is bifurcated between those who haven't "upgraded" and those that have? That's true if the world is a conversion funnel for merchants, but why should consumers do this?

"Growth in on-site purchases will "help commerce merchants that are feeling the pain from Apple's iOS change," Levy wrote."

> I think this means that FB's strategy to blunt iOS is to try to convince merchants to move more commerce on-platform. Ok that's one approach, but an incomplete one.

This Meta storytelling (at best) and wishful thinking (at worst) likely doesn't bode well for their own employee morale and retention.

To which I say: - What's your plan for solving your user engagement issues vis-a-vis Tiktok? This is your top priority by far.

- Internal Meta employees likely know that the company isn't going to challenge Shopify.

- Noticeably absent is any discussion about the consumer and the fundamentals of retail. Does the company think that they will take share from Amazon? If so, what is their consumer value proposition?

Are consumers suddenly just going to decide that convenience. and the delivery experience are not an important part of retail?

Retail is logistics.

Google has been trying for 15 years to blunt the rise of Amazon, unsuccessfully, and FB is essentially saying the reason is they didn't have their own Google Stores product?

If anything, if I'm #Amazon I double-down on my efforts to target Facebook's advertising business as it seems like there's blood in the water here.

#ecommerce