Do you own an e-commerce store? Are you making use of social media to promote your business online? For online businesses to be successful, Facebook and Instagram are essential! Using Facebook and Instagram’s Catalog Manager, companies can store a catalog of their products for use in advertisements. To display your products, you can connect your product catalog with various channels such as Facebook marketplace and Instagram Shopping, among others. In this article, we are going to demonstrate creating a Facebook Catalog Feed for your online business using the ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Feed Plugin.
If you do not have one of these catalog generation plugins, you can still create a Catalog manually; it will just take a lot longer, and upkeeping the catalog with regular updates can be a tough job. Begin by ensuring your business manager is set up and ready to go! Everyone in business should have the Facebook Business Manager installed, no matter what industry they are in. Advertisements can be created in greater detail with the Business Manager, which also provides essential analytics to help you better understand what is working and what isn’t.
What is a Facebook Shop?
Shops on Facebook have traditionally been geared toward online retail stores selling products, but Facebook is planning to expand the tools to include service-based businesses and digital products in its plans for Shops. One of the biggest changes has been the creation of a complete ecosystem for end-to-end commerce.
When it comes to selling and marketing products through Facebook Shops there are many tools available to help you do so. Businesses can go all-in on Facebook Shops and create a full-fledged online shopping experience for free. According to the company’s strategy, Facebook will also keep expanding its partnership network, including Shopify, WooCommerce, and many others.
After you’ve created a catalog, you can do the following:
- Information about your products can be added and managed, such as titles and images as well as descriptions and prices, as well as variants, and other information. It is possible to upload items one by one or in bulk.
- Your catalog can be divided into sub-groups called sets (for ads) or collections (for shops).
- Allow selected people or businesses to work on your catalog by granting them access to it.
- Customers can see the correct item information and prices for their country or language in your ads and shop if you upload the country and language information.
Using the ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Feed Plugin for Facebook & Instagram to create a Facebook Catalog
You can use the Facebook Catalog to enter relevant product information about your products to be displayed on the Facebook marketplace and Instagram Shopping, as well as Instagram. The downside is that it takes a lot of time to manually enter each product’s details in a spreadsheet and upload them to Facebook. Because of this, you can use the plugin to generate product feeds from WooCommerce stores and feature them on the Facebook marketplace. This means you can increase your sales through Facebook and Instagram, which will increase the visibility of your products around the world.
Key Features
- Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shopping allow you to easily promote your products to a wider audience.
- You can create and manage an infinite number of feeds.
- Product Feed for Variable Products can be created.
- Sell your products to the countries you want to reach.
- Generate product feeds in XML/CSV file formats as needed.
- Set the Product Feeds to Refresh Automatically.
- Google Product Categories assist you in mapping out your Product Categories.
- Efficiently Map Product Attributes
- Google Product Attributes can be used to map your Custom Attributes.
- Create a feed based on the number of items in stock and the number of items sold.
Configuring the ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Feed for Facebook and Instagram:
Learn how to complete the checkout process on ELEX by reading this article. Additionally, you can learn how to download, install, and activate ELEX plugins here.
After you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you can begin creating your feed. Navigate to the WordPress Sidebar menu, then to the “ELEX Facebook Shopping Feed”, and then to the “Create Feed” option.
Generic settings
The plugin’s generic settings are shown below.
Project Name: Enter a unique project name to make it easier to identify a feed in the future.
Project Description: Enter a description for your feed, or leave it blank.
Country of Sale: Specify the country in which you want to focus your Facebook marketplace sales efforts.
Include Variations: Select this option to include all the product variations for your products.
Auto-set identifier_exists: Catalog feeds can upload products without unique identifiers (like GTIN, MPN, and Brand) when the auto-set identifier is enabled.
File Format: Depending on your needs, select CSV, TSV, or XML as the file format.
Refresh Schedule: It is possible to schedule Cron jobs to automatically update the catalog feed. Daily (at a specified time), Weekly, or Monthly (at a specified time and day of the week when the feed was created) are all options available (at specified time and date of creation of the feed).
Currency Conversion: Adding the conversion rate is useful if you’re selling your products in an area that uses a different currency.
When you’ve finished configuring the above options, click Save & Continue.
Map Category
Product categories can be mapped using Google Categories.
Customers who search for your product on Facebook or Instagram will see it if it’s mapped with the default category on Google. By default, this tab will display all of your store’s categories. All you have to do now is map them with the appropriate Google categories.
It’s possible to map out all of the categories you need from the list. When generating the feed, only categories that have been mapped will be taken into account. Multiple products can be added and mapped to a single Google category. Mapping with Google product categories will assist you in categorizing and subcategorizing your items for sale. Your products will be listed on the Facebook marketplace when a customer searches for them.
Map Product
With Google categories, you can easily map specific products. You can use this feature if you do not need to map all products in a category with a Google category using the ‘Map Category’ option. Individual products can be mapped with Google categories here. Map out your products by entering their names in the search box.
After you’ve finished configuring these, click the Continue button.
Mapping Attributes
It is essential to map your product attributes to Google attributes. All required attributes demanded by Facebook Marketplace will be listed in the Recommended Attributes tab by default. To enter a custom attribute value, click on the edit button and enter a value that corresponds to Google attributes for your products.
Filtering Options
For generating feeds with selected products, you can filter the products based on their Stock Quantity and Sold Quantity (number of products sold). There is also the option to create exclusive feeds with featured products.
You can prevent specific products from being added to the feed by entering their names in the exclude products box.
Your feed will be generated once you click on “Generate Feed.” Upon successful feed generation, you will be taken to the Generate Feed tab, where you will see that all products have been updated.
Submitting the Catalog Feed file to Facebook
Visit the Facebook Commerce Manager to upload the generated product feed.
To begin, click Get Started.
To create your catalog, select the Create a Catalogue option.
Click Get Started.
Select the catalog type. You have the option of selecting E-commerce here.
Continue by clicking Next.
Add product information by selecting Upload Product Info, entering a catalog name, and clicking the Create button
After clicking the Create button, you’ll see a message in a new tab about the catalog being created.
Click View Catalogue.
The data source will appear on a new tab in the Catalogue section on the left-hand side of the window.
Select the Add Multiple Items option after clicking Add Items.
A new tab will open with three options for submitting your product details to the Facebook marketplace: File upload, Scheduled feed, and Google sheets. Select the File upload option and then click Next.
Choose your generated feed from your system, then click Upload.
Click Next once the file has been uploaded.
Following the configuration, click Next.
If Facebook has mentioned any mapping issues, you can fix them in the next tab. You can then upload the feed to Facebook Catalog.
And just like that, we have created a Facebook Catalog Feed for your Online Business! Read more for detailed settings regarding how to set up ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Feed for Facebook Plugin.
If you have any questions regarding creating a Facebook Catalog, let us know in the comments.
