Introduction
In today’s world, you can easily showcase your products and reach your customers in many ways, especially through social media like Facebook and Instagram. More than 1 billion users in the world use both platforms and people all over the world search for the right place to find the right products based on location, category, and price. In recent updates, both Facebook and Instagram offer separate sections where you can set up a shop, post pictures, and videos about your products, etc. Also, both mediums offer the facilities to add descriptions. Prices and all other facilities.
So, if you are running a business and want to reach more people, it is better to post your shop and product information on both platforms. This article will show you how to sync your Woocommerce catalogue feed with Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shopping.
Why use Facebook and Instagram for your WooCommerce store?
Syncing your WooCommerce store with Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shopping is a great option. Through these two social media platforms, you can take advantage of other benefits. Below you will find these advantages.
- You can get in touch with your customers anytime you want because you can easily connect with your customers through both platforms. You can easily reach them in person or in a group.
- You can promote and sell your product from the same place. You don’t need to go anywhere to promote or sell your product.
- You can easily customize the look of your store on both platforms, as there are many designs and themes that you can use to customize the store.
- Customers can easily checkout as they do not have to switch between screens to make their payments.
Plugin to connect your WooCommerce store with Facebook and Instagram
Looking for the best plugin to connect WooCommerce with Facebook and Instagram, I found many plugins with different options. However, I am looking for a good plugin just for connecting Facebook and Instagram with my WooCommerce store.
Finally, I got what I was waiting for. I got the plugin called “ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Feed for Facebook & Instagram” which has many features and a money-back guarantee.
Come on, let us try the plugin with my WooCommerce store.
ELEX WooCommerce catalog feed for Facebook & Instagram
To display your products on both Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shopping platforms, you have to manually enter all the product data into a sheet manually, which is very tedious. But with this plugin everything is automated, so when you sync the plugin with your WooCommerce, all product data will be automatically submitted to Facebook and Instagram.
So you can easily boost your sales through Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shopping – the plugin will help you do that. In the next section, we will discuss the plugin’s features in detail.
Features of the plugin
- You can sell products to specific countries. The plugin helps you to choose the country you want to target.
- The plugin helps to create much product feeds for variable products.
- The plugin provides flexible ways to create and manage unlimited feeds.
- You can automatically configure product feeds for Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shopping.
- It also allows you to map your product categories to Google product categories.
These are some of the most important features of the plugin. The next section is about the demonstration of the plugin.
Demonstration
First, you should install and activate the plugin in your WordPress dashboard. Then, follow the steps below to create and manage feeds through this plugin.
The following steps will guide you through connecting Facebook to your WooCommerce catalog feed. The last section explains how to connect with Instagram.
Connecting WooCommerce Catalog Feed with Facebook
General Settings
First, you should create a feed to connect to Facebook. To do this, click on the “Create Feed” option and select the “Create Feed” tab on the settings screen. On this screen, you can specify the project name and the name of the country you are focusing your sales. Also, enable the “Sync to Facebook” option.
You can easily update the schedule daily, monthly, etc. If you enable the refresh schedule, you can also set the time to refresh the schedule by selecting the catalog to be refreshed.
Map Category
It is mandatory to assign your products to Google’s default category as this would help customers find your products on Facebook and Instagram marketplace.
Here, all the categories in your store will be displayed on the screen by default. You should link the category with the default Google category.
Map individual products with Google categories
If you want to map individual products with Google’s default category, you can do so on the “Map Product” tab in the same “Map Category” screen.
Mapping Product Attributes
Just as you map categories, you should also link your product attributes to Google attributes. All attributes are displayed under the Recommended Attributes heading. The attributes are displayed based on the country you selected on the first feed creation screen.
If you want to add more attributes besides the listed attributes, it is possible under the “Addition Attributes” section on the same screen. You can add the additional attributes using the “Add click” button.
Filtering Option
Using the filter options screen, you can filter the products by the amount of stock and quantities sold. Also, by excluding some products.
Below you can see an example of filtering products by stock and sold quantities.
If you check the box for “Featured Products”, the feed will be generated for Facebook. If you have multiple seller plugins installed, you can specify the vendor name to filter the products based on the vendors.
Adding products in the “Exclude Products” box, the products will be excluded from the feed.
Once you completed everything, click on “Generate Feed”.
Generate Feed
You can see the feed generated and below is the example feed generated in XML format.
View Excluded simple product
You can view the excluded products from the feed, it may be some issues in linking attributes or links.
Settings
The settings screen will help in connecting to your Facebook marketplace. First, mention the Google product category language and then click the “Connect FB” button.
Once you got connected with FB, the user id, business id and catalogs will be displayed.
Now you could see the products that are added to the catalog which will be available in the Facebook Commerce Manager.
Uploading the catalog feed file to Facebook
You already have an XML feed file that should be uploaded to Facebook. To do so, visit the Facebook Commerce Manager.
Now click on the “Get Started” button and select the option “Create a Catalogue”.
Next, choose the catalog type as “E-commerce”.
Then next will be the configure settings screen where mention catalog name and finally click the button “Create”.
Now, you can view the catalog once it is created.
When you click the “View Catalog” button, a new screen will be generated there click the “Data Source” option under “Catalogue”.
Next select “Add Multiple items” under the “Add items” option.
Now you will get the “Use Bulk upload” option where you could upload the XML file generated. Click on the button “File Upload” and click “Next”.
Finally, upload the XML file and click “Next”.
In the final screen, give the name of the data source and default currency.
Now, the Facebook feed is successfully done.
Connect Facebook catalogue with Instagram business account
To open an Instagram marketplace, you need a business account on Instagram. You should also have a Facebook catalogue, as mentioned in the section above. You can easily connect to your Instagram business account using Facebook Commerce Manager. Just follow the steps below in Facebook Commerce Manager.
- In Facebook commerce manager, click on the “Settings” option.
- Select the catalogue that is connected to your Facebook account.
- Now, on the settings page, select the Business Assets option. Under “Ad and sales channels”, select Instagram.
- Click “Add Instagram account” to connect.
Once it is connected, you can set more details.
Final Thought
Reaching customers through social media is an imperative process to excel in your business. So, if you connect these two platforms Instagram and Facebook with WooCommerce, you can give your shop great potential. The connection process may take a bit more time, but it has more benefits.