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Facebook Improving eCommerce Tools

Social media multinational Facebook Inc. (FB) held its somewhat-annual F8 developer conference in early June, launching new products and tools for developers to connect consumers with brands. Focal points involved improvements for Instagram, WhatsApp, and augmented reality (AR) platforms. (See FB stock analysis on TipRanks)

Highlighting these changes in his analysis on the stock, Brent Thill of Jefferies Group assigned a Buy rating and provided a price target of $385, reflecting a potential upside of 14.39% from Monday’s closing price. Thill wrote that through its new tools, he expects Facebook to derive substantial value from millions of advertisers.

First, Thill spotlighted the newly launched Application Programing Interface for Instagram, which will allow businesses to incorporate their own apps in its messaging platform to more easily facilitate engagements with consumers. Because over 90% of Instagram users follow a brand, he expects this shift to provide a massive opportunity for B2C interaction and also improve customer experiences.

The analyst detailed the commerce-related improvements announced for WhatsApp, the messaging platform with over two billion global users. These included reducing API configuration times from weeks to minutes, adding advanced engagement and notification abilities, and introducing automated messaging options for users to communicate with businesses.

Thill was encouraged by Facebook’s augmented reality platform, which has been testing AR filters for video conferencing purposes. He mentioned that the company has over three times the amount of AR filter creators of Snap Inc. (SNAP).

On TipRanks, Facebook has an analyst rating consensus of Strong Buy, based on 28 Buy, 4 Hold, and 1 Sell ratings. The average FB analyst price target is $385.69, representing a potential 12-month upside of 14.59%.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analyst. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.

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