Facebook now requiring $50,000 monthly spend on ecommerce sites wanting local support
Online social giant Facebook is now requiring ecommerce businesses who want on-the-ground Australian support to spend a minimum of $50,000 a month, Mumbrella understands.
Facebook has conceded it has imposed the minimum spend at its Australian operations after emails were sent to customers, including takeaway delivery service Eatnow.com.au.
But it insists the required minimum spend is not across all categories.
“We don’t have a minimum spend level across Facebook Australia,” said a spokeswoman for Facebook.
“Each team has a variety of methods that they use to determine the customers they work with. Within the ecommerce team a spend of approximately $50,000 is one of the factors.”
Facebook’s new required minimum spend for ecommerce customers came to light after Eatnow posted details of the Facebook email on an online forum.
The email from the social behemoth read: “We’ve grown some big accounts in the last year and downsizing our overall B.O.B. (book of business) for now while we try to support them more effectively.
“At this point our minimums have been raised to $50K+ per month to help us streamline our portfolio. This means though that EatNow will no longer be supported from Sydney.”
The email exchange posted online. Click to enlarge.
Facebook staff then went on to explain the various online and phone supports available to ecommerce customers through other support centres in Singapore and New Zealand.
The company told ecommerce customers unable to meet the $600,000 a year spend threshold that they “can expect a response from this team within 24 hours, time to solution may vary depending on the issue.”
The speed of Facebook’s Australian support made headlines last month after the University of New South Wales’s Facebook page was hacked on its Open Day.
It took more than three hours for UNSW to regain control of the page, only to then lose control again the next day.
Facebook noted that it had limited resources in Australia and like all businesses needed to set limits on which customers could get local support.
“The eCommerce team manages a diverse range of customers and to provide the necessary support that they need we have reassessed the number of customers we work with from this team,” said the spokeswoman.
“We, like many publishers, regularly review the portfolio of customers that we manage from Sydney to ensure that the service levels we provide match their business needs.
“For example, we try to provide a higher level of service to brands that have a strong appetite to grow their business using Facebook and who want to try new and innovative ways to reach their audiences.”
Nic Christensen
Hubris
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Their ‘support’ is useless anyway
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Can we share this story or do we have to cut and paste it?
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Hi BD,
Share buttons are at the bottom of the article.
Cheers,
Alex – editor, Mumbrella
Company imposes sensible parameters to enable it to scale efficiently, with clearly defined terms of service; hold the front page.
Plenty of traditional companies could learn from this.
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Alex, I think BD’s comment was in response to the FB privacy hoax doing the rounds this week that had to be cut and paste, and not shared
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Thanks Ben, indeed they were. I’m kind-of disappointed the Mumbrella team didn’t pick up on that.
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