Meta’s latest commerce tools are opening new revenue paths for small businesses worth understanding now.
If you sell products and advertise on Facebook or Instagram, the way those platforms work for your business is about to change in some meaningful ways.
Meta used the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week to announce a series of updates to its commerce and advertising tools, several of which are relevant to small and medium businesses selling online in Australia.
The changes centre on three areas: live video advertising, AI-powered ad assembly, and creator affiliate tools. Together they represent a shift in how Meta wants businesses to think about the platform, less as an ad network and more as an end-to-end sales channel.
Live video goes shoppable
Meta is bringing Live Video Ads to Instagram and expanding them globally on Facebook. For businesses, this means you can now promote your live video streams as ads, reaching audiences beyond your existing followers and driving them directly into a live shopping experience.
On Facebook, Live Shopping Tools sit inside the live video experience itself. Viewers can browse products, check pricing, and make purchases without leaving the stream.
For product-based businesses that have not yet explored live selling, this lowers the barrier to entry. You do not need a dedicated platform or a large following to reach new buyers. A promoted live stream can now function as both a brand moment and a direct sales event.
AI does the ad matching
This is the update with the broadest practical implications for anyone running Sales campaigns on Meta.
Previously, advertisers had to choose between different ad formats, with product data such as titles, pricing, availability, and descriptions only feeding into certain campaign types. That created fragmentation, where performance data and creative assets sat in separate buckets.
Meta is changing that approach. Product data is becoming a core input across all Sales campaigns. Advertisers provide their product catalogue and creative assets, and Meta’s AI system automatically assembles the best-performing ad for each individual viewer in real time.
In practice, this means less manual decision-making about which format to run and more reliance on Meta’s system to optimise across formats automatically. For small business owners without dedicated marketing teams, that reduction in complexity is worth paying attention to.
Product data will also feed into other parts of Meta’s ecosystem, including AI-powered shopping recommendations and creator product tagging in Reels.
Creators in 22 countries can now add affiliate links or tag products directly from a business catalogue on Instagram, including inside Reels and Feed posts. When a viewer purchases through a creator’s tag, the creator earns a commission from the affiliate partner.
For small businesses, this opens a low-cost acquisition channel. Rather than paying upfront for influencer content, you make your catalogue available for creators to tag, and pay commission only when a sale occurs.
The model shifts some of the selling work to creators who already have the audience trust, while giving businesses broader reach without a proportionally larger ad spend.
What to do with this
Not every update here requires immediate action, but a few things are worth considering now. If you run Sales campaigns on Meta, make sure your product catalogue is current, complete, and properly connected to your ad account. That catalogue is becoming the foundation for how Meta’s AI matches and serves your products, and gaps in product data will limit how effectively the system works for you.
If live selling is something you have been curious about, the expansion of Live Video Ads makes it more accessible than it has been before. It is worth experimenting with before the format becomes crowded.
And if you work with creators or have been thinking about it, the affiliate tagging tools now available across 22 countries make a commission-based arrangement simpler to set up and track than it was previously.
Meta’s broader direction is clear. The platform is building toward a model where discovery and purchase happen in the same moment, inside content, without friction. For small businesses selling products online, getting your catalogue and creative assets in order now puts you in a better position to take advantage of that shift as it continues to develop.
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