How will online shopping change on Meta platforms?

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In Meta’s future there is undoubtedly the metaverse with the aim of being able to grow the business by going beyond the traditional model of advertising. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Nick Clegg, Meta’s President for global affairs, clearly said, with no room for misinterpretation, that the Meta metaverse will monetize through e-Commerce. But there are many unknowns and in Meta’s recent past, precisely in the field of e-Commerce, there are bankruptcies and withdrawals.

Full speed ahead with the metaverse

During last year’s Facebook Connect event, the announcement of the Group’s name change accompanied by the words of CEO Mark Zuckerberg – “The metaverse will be the successor of the mobile Internet” – certainly left no room for different imaginations. But now the assets also arrive, specifically the Meta Quest Pro, the first viewer developed specifically for the metaverse that does not require any additional device such as a PC or Smartphone to work (available in Italy from 25 October at the price of 1799, 99 euros).
While waiting for a large audience to really afford to enter the metaverse hypothesized by Zuckerberg with such an expensive viewer, the company announced that it has added a new Personal Office feature to the Horizon Workrooms platform (which will soon integrate with Zoom and Teams of Microsoft) to allow people to create their own “custom portion in the metaverse” to … work.

“One of the best things about virtual reality is that you can create environments that go beyond what is possible in the physical world,” were the words of Zuckerberg during his presentation at Meta Connect 2022. “Of course, this also applies to the settings of productivity, in order to have instant access to your perfect workspace, configured as you wish, no matter where you are. “To dispel any doubts about the possible connection between the new super viewer and Horizon Workrooms as the” metaverse to work Is Andrew Bosworth, CTO of Meta, indulging in this statement: “In the end, we think your Quest may be the only monitor you will actually need.”

Without wanting to dismantle the dreams and visions of those who certainly understand more than us, however advanced a virtual workspace may be, to date, it seems difficult to imagine that people use a VR viewer to work several hours a day (considering the already current increase in technological fatigue from the use of videocall and collaboration systems). It is certain that visions must also be given time to find fertile ground and mature. And in this Mark Zuckerberg does not seem to have proved it yet. Numerous turnarounds for him.

The end of online shopping on Meta platforms?

It is likely that early next year Meta will remove the “shop” button on Instagram’s main navigation panel which directs users to retailer listings. In fact, the company has long been downsizing its commercial ambitions by clashing with online sales that have never really taken off and, more recently, even with a decline in advertising (which currently accounts for 98% of the multinational’s revenue). Already the Facebook Marketplace project, a feature that allowed Facebook users to buy and sell second-hand goods launched in 2016, raised doubts about the possible monetization through App commerce.