Social media platform Facebook is trialling a feature which will allow users to “want” and “buy” items they see on the site.

The Facebook feature is called “Collections” and enables users on Facebook to engage with items by “liking”, “collecting” or “wanting” them. Products within Collections will also have a buy link which will direct users to the retailers’ transactional site.

Once users have engaged with an item in the Collections feature it will then appear on their Facebook Timeline which can been seen by their Facebook friends.

A spokesperson from Facebook said: “We’ve seen that businesses often use Pages to share information about their products through photo albums. We are beginning a small test in which a few select businesses will be able to share information about their products through a feature called Collections. 

“Collections can be discovered in News Feed, and people will be able to engage with these collections and share things they are interested in with their friends. People can click through and buy these items off of Facebook.”

Collections is currently being trialled with a number of retailers in the US including lingerie retailer Victoria Secret.  

Last week Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social network has reached over 1 billion users.

Topics