You may experience a slightly different set of screens if you do not already have a Commerce Account. However, the flow offers users the opportunity to create new assets when needed.

You may also need to verify the domain attached to your account before you are allowed to progress. In this instance, please press the back button until you get to the Open Your Shop screen, uncheck the ‘Instagram Shopping’ box and continue through the steps above.

You’ll be redirected to a WooCommerce hosted endpoint that confirms that the URL is actually for your shop.

Click on ‘THAT’S MY SITE – REDIRECT ME’. 

Your Facebook connection page should look something like this; you are now connected.

Sync Products to Facebook

How to manage your WooCommerce Catalog

To make your shop more discoverable and easier to navigate, you will need to have a complete commerce catalog.  The search, sort and filter controls rely on high-quality catalog data to make it easier for buyers to consider a broad range of items and find the exact product they want. 

To start setting up your catalog go to Products > Categories.

You should map a WooCommerce category to a Facebook category (using the Google Product Category Taxonomy). Google Product Category (GPC) codes are required for the proper calculation of tax. GPC information can be set at both the global and individual product levels. To assign a default GPC to all products in your catalog, navigate to Marketing > Facebook > Product Sync tab and select the appropriate primary and secondary GPC in the section titled Default Google Product Category. A minimum of two category levels are required.

This allows you to:

1. Provide category specific fields to Facebook, e.g. material, size, color, style.
2. Have Facebook apply tax correctly to your items when they’re displayed in Shops

These default values will apply to any product within that category, but, you can also override these on the individual product level by navigating to Products > All Products and clicking the Edit option underneath a particular product.

Please select two categories.  You’ll then see a dropdown with more detailed attributes to complete should you wish to do so:

Click on ‘Show advanced options’’ and complete these additional categories:

There are a few other settings worth pointing out:

1. Enable product sync – Use this to disable product syncing entirely. If this option is selected, an alternate data source must be provided to ensure your catalog has all of the fields required for Checkout, e.g. GPC, inventory, and variant attributes.
   
2. Exclude categories from sync – Enables you to quickly filter out products for a given category from your Facebook catalog.
   
3. Exclude tags from sync – Enables you to quickly filter out products with a given tag from your Facebook catalog.
   
4. Product description sync – Allows you to customise whether a short or standard description should be used for each product.

Catalog Syncing

Once your catalog has been set up, all that remains is a full product sync. In most cases, all products will have already been synced when the plugin is first connected to Facebook.

Subsequently, products will be synced any time a new product is created or an existing product is changed. In the event products are not syncing as expected, a sync can be triggered manually via the Marketing > Facebook > Product Sync tab by clicking the Sync products button.

How to create a Collection / Product Set

Collections are a way to group your products within your shop (e.g. curating items based on top trends or seasons).  They are called Product Sets within WooCommerce, you’ll need to create your own Collections to group specific products together. You can manage your collections in the plugin from Products > FB Product Sets.

Give your product set a name and description, then assign it a category. Any products with the assigned WC Product Category will automatically be added to that collection/product set.

Variable Products / Variants

Almost there! Now you’ll want to ensure all attributes for your variable products are set up to sync to Facebook correctly. Variant information is required to display the correct options to buyers during checkout. 

In WooCommerce, attributes can be defined at both the global and product levels. Global attribute definitions can be found at Products > Attributes and assigned a list of potential values, known as “Terms.”

Once defined, these attributes can then be assigned directly to a simple product, e.g.

Global attributes can also be assigned to variable products to be used for individual variations.

IMPORTANT: Note that every variation must have a single value for a given attribute. In the above example, the variation with ID #78, would need to be expanded into distinct products corresponding to each of the available sizes. Attempting to sync with a value of “Any Size…” would result in an invalid Checkout product.

In addition to standard WooCommerce attributes, the plugin also supports setting particular category specific variant attributes using the “Facebook” tab on the “Edit Product” page. NOTE: For variable products, category specific attribute values set at the parent level will override the attributes for any child variations.

An additional inventory field is required for checkout to let buyers know when products are running low or out of stock. In order to set up your product inventory, stock management must first be enabled for WooCommerce. Confirm this setting is checked under WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Inventory.

Once this setting has been enabled, inventory counts can be set as follows:

1. From the Edit Product page for a Simple Product.

NOTE: For variable products, stock quantities can be set at both the global or individual variation levels.

3. From the Edit Product > Variations page for a Variable Product (individual).

4. Lastly, from the Bulk Edit > Product Data section.

Facebook Product Data

On the Edit Product page, a new tab called “Facebook” is visible. Here, you can decide whether to enable Facebook sync to your Facebook catalog or not. By default, when you’re creating a new product, “Sync and show in catalog” will be selected. Also, there are a couple of other useful settings.

NOTE: Facebook sync setting for variable product type is available on the Variations tab.

When you have published a product, and Facebook sync is enabled, the plugin will automatically sync the product to your Facebook catalog. The corresponding metadata will be generated and visible on the sidebar.

Facebook Product Validation

Besides showing the metadata ( mentioned in the Facebook Product Data ) the sidebar Facebook box is used to display product validation issues. Some of the settings of a product may cause it not to synchronise correctly with the Facebook catalog. The plugin is able to find some of the issues and inform the user about what the problem is. To find more about the types of validation performed please check the

Facebook Shop

How to activate your Facebook Shop

Facebook Shops is a simple version of your online store that lives inside the Facebook mobile app. Facebook Shops make it easy for billions of users to find, browse, and buy your products in the apps they use daily to discover new experiences.

Next go back to the Marketing > Facebook tab and select Manage Connections:

On the Connection Settings page you will find the option to the add the Messenger/Customer Chat Plugin directly to your website. The Customer Chat Plugin allows people to start a conversation with you on your website and continue in Messenger. You’ll be able to respond to questions and provide support.

Detailed instructions about this plugin and how to install can be found on the Facebook Chat Plugin – Live Chat Plugin for WordPress plugin page. (Please note, the Chat plugin is not part of the Facebook for WooCommerce plugin and therefore we cannot offer support with this.)

Next click the Commerce tab,

If the Facebook Shop toggle is off, turn it on! Now click on “Manage Shop”. If you see, ”Your shop is under review“, allow some time to complete the review and come back later.  

Complete the design of your shop with Shop Builder

Click the Edit button to edit the style of your shop.

To complete your shop, follow the tutorials and the wizards in Shop Builder to design your shop.

How to Create Ads on Facebook

From your WooCommerce dashboard go to Marketing > Facebook and click on Manage Connection.

This will take you to the Home page of the Facebook business extension for your store. From here you can create a Facebook Ad by clicking on Create Ad.

On the next page you will be prompted to choose a goal for your Facebook Ad campaign. 

Choose the applicable goal for your needs. You will be asked a few quick questions about your audience and have the opportunity to upload more images relevant to your campaign. Once completed, you will be taken to the Promote Now page. Here you will have the opportunity to choose more goals for your ad campaign, see Estimated Daily Results and manage your ad spend budget. Add your preferred payment method and click the Promote Now button to activate your Facebook Ad campaign.

Order Management

Once you start receiving orders from Facebook, these orders should be managed directly within WooCommerce. Currently, the plugin supports order completion, refunds and cancellations.

When an incoming order is received, you will see a notification under WooCommerce > Orders.

Orders will be synced with an initial status of “Processing”.

The order details page will contain additional customer information and relevant product information required to fulfil the order.

IMPORTANT: Email addresses associated with Facebook orders are strictly prohibited from being used for remarketing purposes. Automated order status emails should also be suppressed as emails will already be sent to buyers directly from Facebook.

Customer Emails

There are a few crucial details worth highlighting with regard to customer emails.

1. Customer email addresses for Facebook orders are strictly prohibited from being used for remarketing. Failure to comply with this policy will result in your Shop being closed. In the future, we may present an option for buyers to opt-in to remarketing emails and this will be indicated as such in the order details.
   
2. Any automated emails sent out to communicate order status, refunds, etc, should be disabled for all Facebook orders. Facebook will send emails to customers directly and any additional emails would be duplicative, leading to a negative customer experience.

Order Fulfillment

In order to fulfil an order, you’ll need to have the shipment carrier and tracking number handy, as these are required to complete the order. With this information in hand, simply set the order status to Completed and click Update to apply the changes.

When prompted to do so, enter the required shipment carrier and tracking number information.

NOTE: If your using the WooCommerce Shipment Tracking plugin, and the carrier/tracking number has already been applied to this order, you will not need to re-enter this information and the above modal will not appear.

Refunds & Cancellations

In the event an order needs to be refunded or canceled, this can be done via the order details page. To refund an order, it must have a current status of Completed. At the bottom of the Edit Order page, click Refund to initiate the refund process.

Select the items and quantities to be refunded, along with a reason for the refund. Enter a description for the refund if necessary. Finally, confirm the refund by clicking Refund $XX.XX manually.

The final refund amount should now be reflected in the order details, e.g.

Cancellations are also managed via the Edit Order page by setting the status to Cancelled.

Upon saving, a prompt will appear. Select the appropriate reason for cancellation and click

“Submit cancellation” to confirm.

Use Facebook Messenger

You can add Messenger to your site from Marketing > Facebook, clicking Manage Connection, and clicking Add by Messenger Chat.

You can then adjust the language, default greeting, and widget color to better match your site’s brand and voice.

Once enabled, the Messenger widget will appear on your site so customers can chat with you. Conversations can carry over between Facebook and your WooCommerce site.

You can view your Messenger settings from the Marketing > Facebook > Messenger tab.

Setting your Away Hours and Message

In Facebook, you can configure days and times when Messenger should automatically send an away message to your customers that start chatting. These settings apply to Messenger in Facebook and on your WooCommerce site.

It’s important to set yourself as “away” when you can’t respond quickly to messages, both to provide good customer service and to ensure your reported response rate/time calculations published on your Facebook Page aren’t negatively impacted by long delays.

Follow the steps below to configure your away times and message:

1. Login to Facebook and go to your business page.
2. Click Inbox.

1. Go to Automated Responses.
2. On the Away message tab, click Edit.
3. In the Timing section, update the days/times to when you are away (i.e. set your “closed” hours). You can click the Add Time button to add new rows as needed. This will determine when the away message is sent after a customer chats in Messenger.

1. In the Message section, update the away message text. Click Add Personalization to add merge tags to personalise the message with the customer’s name, your store name, etc. You can see a preview of the message on the right side of the screen.
2. Click Save.

This message will now appear during the indicated days/times when a customer sends a message in Messenger from Facebook or your WooCommerce store.

You can also set yourself as “away” outside of your scheduled away hours by going to the Inbox and selecting the messenger icon in the Main toolbar. From here, you can switch between “Available” and “Away”.

Troubleshooting

Account quality

Some of the problems regarding your Facebook business accounts are related to insufficient account quality. Facebook checks your account to verify that it is compliant with Facebook terms and policies. If it detects issues your account may be restricted or disabled. More information and link to the Account Quality review can be found in About Account Quality at the Facebook Business Help Center. One of the most common issues is account blocked because two-factor authentication was not enabled.

Two-Factor Authentication

Facebook requires that every Business Manager older than 90 days had two-factor authentication enabled. Two-factor authentication is a layer of security that prevents unauthorised access to your Business Manager. 

It is advised to proceed with the two-factor authentication set up during the initial plugin setup because it is easy to miss the 90 days grace period that does not require the setup.

Feed Generation memory issues

Sometimes, if your shop has big products catalog the feed generation process may fail due to limited server memory. The error visible in the logs will look similar to this:

unexpected shutdown: PHP Fatal error Allowed memory size of 419430400 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 20480 bytes) in /wp-includes/functions.php on line 624

This stops your site’s ability to generate the product feed required for some of the synchronisation processes between your WooCommerce site and Facebook Business Manager. Even if the feed generation process would not fail it still could cause slowness of the admin interface.

In Facebook For WooCommerce version 2.6.6, a new feed generation process was added. It should be free of the memory issues that the old generator was experiencing. To enable the new process please go to Facebook plugin settings in wp-admin Marketing > Facebook and stay on the Connection tab, then scroll to the bottom to the Debug section.

Enable the Experimental! Enable new style feed generation option. As the description points out this feature is still in the experimental phase. As soon we will confirm that it fixes the problem we will enable it for all the users and we will remove the old feed generator.

There are no other steps required. After you enable the option and click Save changes, the next scheduled feed generation will use the new process.

The new feed generator processes the catalog in batches in the background. This allows avoiding the server memory limitation.

Sync Issues

WPEngine runs a script that terminates processes taking longer than 60 seconds, which might stop the sync process. This only impacts clients on their shared hosting. A temporary workaround is to reach out to WPEngine and ask to have the script turned off for the duration of the sync.

Product validation issues

The Facebook Product Sync sidebar box is able to perform basic validation of the product. In case a problem is detected the information about the problem will be displayed in the box. For example:

Not published products are not synchronised to the Facebook Catalog. Or:

Facebook does not accept products with capital letters only titles.

Other possible statuses:

• Product sync is globally disabled.
  – enable globa sync setting to allow products sync
• Product must be in stock.
  – if WooCommerce hide out of stock option is selected the product must be in stock in order to sync
• Product is hidden from catalog and search.
  – product is set to one of the not visible settings in the product Publish > Catalog visibility section
• Product excluded because of categories.
  – product is in one of the excluded categories
• Product excluded because of tags.
  – product is in one of the excluded tags
• Sync disabled in product field.
  – product is not set to sync in the product Facebook tab
• Product description is all capital letters.
  – product description must not be capital letters only
• Product description is too long. Maximum allowed length is 5000 characters.
  – product description is too long
• Product title is all capital letters.
  – product description must not be capital letters only
• Product title is too long. Maximum allowed length is 150 characters.
  – product title is too long

Other sync issues

An additional cause of a product (especially variable product) isn’t synced properly to the Facebook catalog is that when we create a global product attribute and the attribute name contains a disallowed character :.

If we use the global attribute name that contains such disallowed character in the variable product Product data > Attributes tab when we publish or update the product, the product variations Facebook metadata are broken.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Facebook policies or processes should I be aware of before setting up my store?

Products sold on Facebook must comply with Facebook’s Commerce Policies. If you intend to advertise your products you must also comply with Facebook’s Advertising Policies.

Uploaded products go through a review process and your product may be removed if found to be in violation of Facebook’s policies. If you believe a product was incorrectly rejected, you can request a second review. 

Facebook also collects feedback from people who make purchases on Facebook Products, including the Audience Network and this feedback is translated into a feedback score.

When a business receives poor feedback scores on topics such as delivery speed, product quality or customer service, ads that the business runs may see reduced delivery. If the business receives a significantly high proportion of negative feedback, it may experience a temporary or permanent loss of advertising and/or access to Facebook Commerce surfaces.

Why should I not use the same value for categories and attributes?

WooCommerce provides a way for a user to set attributes already:

If we see an attribute with the same (case insensitive) name as a category specific one (like ‘color’ in the example above) then, unless it is explicitly overridden in the above shown product level view, we’ll send that value.

If you have two WooCommerce categories that both set a default value or google product category and they both get applied to a product, what do you do if they disagree? We find the first non-conflicting value by traversing up the tree (WooCommerce categories are also hierarchal). If you do not find a non-conflicting version we assume there’s no valid default. 

How can I tell if the Facebook Pixel has been properly installed on my site?

The Pixel Helper is a small Chrome extension provided by Facebook which will allow you to verify that your pixel has been properly installed and works as expected. 

I am getting an “Oops, something went wrong.” error. How can I connect to my Facebook account?

While this error can occur for a few different reasons, the most common seems to be in relation to Facebook’s supported currencies.

If your WooCommerce default currency is not on this list, some folks have had success temporarily changing their currency to a supported one (USD, CAD, GBP, EUR) to connect and then changing it back afterward.

Help! I’ve been locked out of my Facebook account. What should I do?

We’re so sorry about that! This should now be a rare occurrence in the plugin but can occur if you create a Facebook account immediately before setting up business accounts, pages, and other assets. 

My pixel is missing or not available. How can I see all the pixel’s through the plugin setup window?

As of version 2.0 of the plugin, only pixels created through the business manager can be selected through the plugin setup window. Personal ad pixels will not be available.

Versions prior to 2.0 were the opposite: Only personal ad pixels were available, and business manager pixels were not.

How can I get Facebook to display prices including tax?

The price synced to your Facebook catalog should include tax if your WooCommerce shop is set to display prices including tax. You can find this option available at WooCommerce > Settings > Tax and select “Including tax” from the Display prices in the shop drop-down option.

That said, there are other tax options at play here. For instance, if you have the store set to “Entered prices exclude tax” yet the Display options are both set to “Including tax”, WooCommerce will need to generate tax on the product price before sending this across to Facebook. If the tax option is set to generate taxes from the “Customer’s address” then this might not work, as the Facebook sync has no specific customer address.

In this case, you’ll need to work out the best workaround:

• Setting the “calculate tax based on” to the shop address
• Enter prices inclusive of tax

Some events are not triggering with caching plugins (Breeze, SG Optimizer, Asset CleanUp, etc). How can I fix this?

Some caching plugins have some optimisation settings that cause a conflict with the pixel tracking code that will result in the event not being triggered. This can be tested with the pixel helper Chrome extension and seeing that the ViewContent (as an example) is not triggered on the view product page.

The fix is to disable grouping of JS.

Troubleshooting this feature? Click here