Woocommerce and Facebook

Important note: The store function on Facebook has been available in Austria since August 10, 2023 no longer possible. In Germany, on the other hand, stores on Facebook and Instagram without activated Conclusion of purchase with Facebook or Instagram will continue to be used until further notice.

Connecting Woocommerce to Facebook means that you can automatically synchronize your Facebook product catalog with the articles in your Woocommerce online store. This has significant advantages:

• You can easily advertise certain products from your store on Facebook
• Facebook can show users products for which the algorithm can recognize a particular affinity among users
• You can set up a Facebook Shop and an Instagram Shop with just a few clicks, the articles are taken from the product catalog.

This tutorial will guide you step by step through the setup of the plugin Facebook for Woocommerce which you can use to connect your WordPress/Woocommerce store to Facebook. This means that the product catalog of your online store is available for your Facebook store and your Facebook advertising.

Table of Contents

• Prerequisite - Domain confirmation
• Connecting Woocommerce with Facebook
• Synchronize products with Facebook
  • Facebook Shop
    • Removing products from the Facebook Shop

Prerequisite - Domain confirmation

Facebook wants to know whether you are really the owner of the store domain. You must therefore confirm the domain of your online store on Facebook (Business Manager > Brand Safety > Domains).

You can read more about this in this Facebook guide:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/domain-verification/

Connecting Woocommerce with Facebook

Note in advance:
You can only use the connection to Facebook for physical products but not for digital content or downloads.

Install the plugin Facebook for Woocommerce in your WordPress/Woocommerce online store and activate it.

Call up the plugin settings under Marketing > Facebook > Connection und klicken Sie auf „Get Started“.

Facebook will now open in the same browser window. Log in to Facebook here (if you are not already logged in to the browser) and agree to the link.

Select the appropriate Business Manager account (or create a new one).

Wählen Sie die zugehörige Facebook Seite aus und verknüpfen Sie diese mit Klick auf „Weiter“.

Danach verknüpfen Sie das eigene Instagram-Profil (das sollte ein Business-Profil sein!). Wenn Sie Ihre Artikel nicht bei Instagram zeigen möchten oder gar kein Instagram Profil haben, dann wählen Sie „Skip connecting to Instagram“.

Now select the product catalog, if you have already created one, or create a new one.

We are creating a new catalog.

Now select this catalog.

Select the advertising account now or create a new one. We already have an advertising account.

You now need to select the meta pixel (formerly Facebook Pixel) or create a new pixel. We already have one. The pixel is a tracking code that Facebook can use to record users who visit your store. The pixel is also used to make your products appear on Facebook.

Of course, the pixel code must be executed in all store pages. The plugin already takes care of this with this step. You therefore do not need to add the pixel code separately.

Finally, you must check and confirm the settings.

It is probably better at the moment no automatic adjustment to allow this. This is because, for example, customer data collected on the website would be sent to Facebook in the case of orders.

Facebook says:

This way you can attribute more conversions and reach more people. We hash this customer information on the website before it is sent to Facebook to protect the privacy of users.

Meta help area for companies

However, it is currently not entirely clear, at least to me, how this is to be seen in the context of the GDPR in Europe; it will probably require the individual consent of the customer. Later, customer data can also be matched manually, always with the customer's consent.

Das letzte „Weiter“ will angeklickt werden. Kontrollieren Sie die Berechtigungen und bestätigen Sie diese.

If everything works so far, woocommerce connects to Facebook.

You will receive a success message after a few seconds (don't lose patience, it may take a while).

Sie können sofort eine Werbeanzeige erstellen, aber wir wollen erstmal den Katalog sehen und eventuell ein Facebook Shop einrichten. Klicken Sie daher auf „Fertig“, und woocommerce meldet sich – hoffentlich – mit einer Erfolgsmeldung.

Der Klick auf „THAT’S MY SITE – REDIRECT ME“ bringt Sie in Ihr Onlineshop zurück. So könnte nun die Information beim Reiter „Connection“ aussehen.

Synchronize products with Facebook

You can see the product categories that you use in your store in Woocommerce under Products > Categories. Diese Kategorien sollten Sie nun mit Facebook Kategorien „mappen“, also zuordnen. Das passiert mithilfe der Google Product Categories (Google Product Categories - GPC), because Facebook also uses the product categories created by Google.

The appropriate GPC information is generally set globally for all products (to do this, select the category that will apply to the majority of your products), but this can also be set for individual products. You may have already done this for your product data feed for the Google Merchant Center if you want to place Google Shopping Ads.

To make the assignment globally, i.e. you first make an entry for the GPC for all products in your store, call up the Marketing > Facebook > Product Sync tab and select under Default Google Product Category a suitable primary Google product category and a secondary Google product category below it. In any case, you need at least two category levels.

Our Demo store carries (not orderable) backpacks, therefore I use as main category Apparel & Accessoriesand as a subcategory Handbags, Wallets & Cases (which, strictly speaking, is not entirely appropriate, I know, but it's just an example).

The assignment of the categories enables:

1. use any category-specific fields such as size, material, style or color in Facebook as well,
2. and Facebook the correct tax information.

The default assignment of the Google product category can (and should) of course also be overwritten for individual products. You can also set the category-specific information (in the example below I have set unisex and all ages für das konkrete Produkt gesetzt). Das ist besonders wichtig bei eventuellen Varianten von Produkten, wenn hier zwischen Eigenschaften unterschieden werden muss. Dann könnten Sie sich sogar die „Advanced options“ zunutze machen.

Your product catalog is now ready for Facebook. Synchronization with Facebook takes place automatically when products are created and changed.

If, in your opinion, synchronization is not taking place correctly (see the synchronized articles in the Facebook Commerce Manager, see below) then you can also initiate this manually:

In the Marketing > Facebook > Product Sync tab, click on the Sync products button.

On Facebook Commerce Manager you should use Catalog > Articles See your products. This makes it possible to use them in your Facebook Ads or in your Facebook or Instagram store.

Tip: you can see what happened to your products during the most recent synchronizations in the Facebook Commerce Manager under Catalog > Data sources > Overview.

You can find a little more detail at Catalog > Data sources > Handles.

When you return to the plugin settings, you should see IDs in all rows of Facebook assets if you have set up the corresponding link. If you have not made a link, you would see a - instead of the ID.

Facebook Shop

You have created the prerequisite for selling your products via a Facebook Shop. In principle, a product catalog in Facebook can receive the articles in these ways:

• Manual entry
• Facebook Pixel for Dynamic Ads (requires the standard event ViewContent on each product page)
• Data feed via table (CSV)
• Data feed via Woocommerce integration

The store itself is always run by Facebook, the products displayed in the Facebook store are taken from the product catalog. When using a Woocommerce store, Facebook receives the product data from the connection to the Woocommerce store. The necessary synchronization of the products happens automatically, but can also be triggered manually (see above).

Note: In addition to the Woocommerce integration, you can also add products to your Facebook and Instagram store manually or using an additional data feed.

With Stores In the Facebook Commerce Manager, you can access the Shop Builder. There you can adjust colors and buttons, change the font size, create categories or Add grids, featured collections and products via drag & drop, remove or sort.

Please note that you can only link one catalog to your store at a time and continue to edit it. It is not possible to change the catalog at a later date.

After the initial setup, the store is checked by Facebook and can only be published after approval.

Here is the preview of the Facebook Shop (left) and the Instagram Shop (right) for our demo store.

After successful verification, the Facebook Shop is live at facebook.com/Your page name/shop. Our demo store is available at https://www.facebook.com/ewerkstatt/shop/. At least as long as Facebook has nothing against a demo store. The articles are synchronized with https://shop.ewerkstatt.com.

Removing products from the Facebook Shop

In principle, you can remove any product directly in the Facebook Commerce Manager under Catalog > Articles manually by archiving it. If you delete it, it can be added to the product catalog again during the next synchronization.

Would you like to exclude a Woocommerce product from the product catalog on Facebook using synchronization?

If the product not yet is in your Facebook catalog, then set the setting in Woocommerce for the product or its variants for Facebook sync auf „Do not sync“. Das Produkt wird nicht mit dem Facebook Produkt Katalog synchronisiert.

If the product already is in your Facebook catalog, then set the product or its variants to Facebook sync erst einmal auf „Sync and hide“. Dadurch erhält Facebook die Information, was mit dem Produkt zu tun ist, das würde aber bei „Do not sync“ unterbleiben. „Do not sync“ bedeutet ja nicht, das Produkt aus dem Katalog zu entfernen, sondern nur, es nicht mehr mit Woocommerce zu synchronisieren. Erst wenn das Produkt im Produkt Katalog nicht mehr existiert, können Sie auf „Do not sync“ umschalten, um diesen Zustand zu bewahren.