Have you ever seen an Instagram post with a small icon in the shape of a shopping bag that redirects you to the product’s website? As you scroll through your Instagram feed, you’ve probably seen them. Instagram’s power to grow a business is undeniable. When it comes to eCommerce stores, it’s the business aspect of Instagram that makes it possible. Instagram shopping posts are what we’re talking about here. With over a billion active users, it is used by a wide range of companies, including e-commerce websites, to promote their website, brand, and products on social media.
If you already have a WooCommerce store up and running, you’ll be delighted to know that you can quickly connect Instagram to WooCommerce and display and advertise all of your WooCommerce products on your Instagram page. As a result, Instagram users will be able to simply browse and shop all of your products, which will help you grow your sales at the same time.
In this article, we’ll go through the advantages of Instagram shoppable posts and how they may help your e-commerce business. Stay tuned because we’ll show you how to connect your WooCommerce site to Instagram Shopping.
What exactly are Instagram shoppable posts?
Users can browse through your products straight on your Instagram business page using shoppable posts on Instagram. The Shopping bag icon can be found in the top right-hand corner on certain stores’ Instagram pages. That’s how you can tell the difference between shoppable and non-shoppable Instagram posts.
Customers can browse any of the products that the company sells in only a few clicks thanks to these catalogs. You’ll see small dots that ask you to click to see the product featured in the photograph. When you click on the image, you’ll get product information and links to the products in it. By featuring your products on Instagram shopping ads you can use the fact that people enjoy exploring and purchasing things online to your advantage.
How to Make Instagram Shoppable Posts Work for You
Market your products organically- Details of the product are highlighted upon clicking on the product
- Make the purchasing process as simple as possible
- Increase your chances of getting discovered by new potential customers
Because shoppable posts bring visitors to the products on your WooCommerce site, using them effectively directs traffic from Instagram to your store. The customer’s journey is made easier by reducing the number of steps required to make a transaction.
How to Integrate Instagram Shopping with Your WooCommerce Store
To enable Instagram Shopping, you’ll need the following:
- A WooCommerce store
- A Facebook page for your company.
- A business account on Instagram
You must first create a Facebook page and catalog feed from which Instagram will obtain your inventory. For your products to appear on the Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shopping, you must enter all essential product information into the Facebook Catalog.
The downside is that it takes a lot of time to manually enter each product’s information into a spreadsheet and upload it to Facebook. To do it correctly, a significant amount of time and work is required. With the help of a catalog feed plugin, we’ll show you how to streamline the entire procedure. The ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Feed for Instagram Plugin extracts product details from WooCommerce stores to assist produce product feeds, making it much easier to advertise products on Instagram.
Benefits of using a catalog feed plugin
- Easily showcase your products on Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shopping.
- Create and manage as many product feeds as you want.
- Product Feeds for Variable Products can be created.
- Increase your sales by targeting specific locations.
- Product feeds can be generated in XML/CSV file formats as needed.
- Set up a regular automatic refresh of the product feeds.
- With Google Product Categories, you can easily map your Product Categories and attributes.
- Create product feeds based on the quantity of stock and sold items.
ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Feed for Facebook & Instagram Plugin: Getting Started
Install the plugin on your WooCommerce store, and it will gather all of the necessary data for Facebook and Instagram, as well as generate a product data feed. You can easily connect this data stream with Facebook Catalog. We’ll walk you through the procedure step by step.
You can download the ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Feed plugin by clicking here.
Once the plugin has been installed and activated, you can start creating your product feeds. Go to the WordPress Sidebar menu > ELEX Facebook Shopping Feed > Create Feed to generate a Facebook Shopping Feed.
Generic settings
You can begin by giving the project a name and a description. This is where you may choose the file type as well as the refresh schedule if you want to update the catalog feed regularly. Also, specify whether or not you want product variations in the feed. After providing all of the essential information, click the Continue button.
Map categories
It’s time for the following step, which is mapping your WooCommerce product categories to the Google categories that match. The Google Category field allows you to start typing in the field, and all possible categories will be displayed for you to choose from. If you don’t want to assign Google Categories to all of your categories, you can add Google categories to specific items. To do so, click on the ‘Map Product’ option on this page.
Map attributes
Mapping product attributes is the next step in the process of creating a product feed. You can match your product attributes to a list of required feed attributes. The plugin will map the relevant attributes automatically. You can, however, update them manually, attach or prepend values to it, or provide more complex mapping rules. When you’re done, click the Continue button.
Filtering options
If you only want to add a subset of products to the feed, you can do so here. When adding products only above a specified stock quantity, for example, you can set that here. You can also filter products depending on how many have been sold so far. Selecting only featured products from your store is another way to filter the product feed.
Additionally, the plugin allows you to exclude certain products from the feed. If you don’t want certain items to appear in the WooCommerce catalog feed for Instagram and Facebook, you can simply enter their names. After that, click the Generate Feed button.
Generate Feed
It will generate a feed containing all of the products that you have selected. By clicking on the View Feed button, you can download the feed. Alternatively, you can click the Manage Feed button to customize the project further or to change the refresh schedule.
Manage Feeds
The Manage Feeds page contains all of the generated feeds and their associated information. Here you can check the feed name, URL, created and updated dates, and the forthcoming refresh date of the feed, if you have configured a scheduled refresh task.
Facebook Catalog Feed File Submission
To upload the newly created product feed to Facebook, go to Facebook Commerce Manager. To add products to the Facebook Catalog, you’ll need a Commerce Manager account. You can build a new catalog after you’ve set up your account. Click the + Add Catalog button in the Catalogs section to do so.
You can now choose the Catalog type. We’ll use eCommerce products in this case. You can choose the upload method in the next step. We’ll use the Upload Product Info option because we’re adding product information in bulk using a CSV file, and then click the Create button. A new Catalog will now be generated.
You can fill your catalog by adding products in bulk after clicking the View Catalog button. A new tab will open, from which you can select the Data source from the Catalogue section on the window’s left side.
Select Add Multiple Items from the Add Items menu.
There are three options to submit your product information to Facebook’s marketplace, which will appear in a new tab: File upload, Scheduled feed, and Google sheets. Upon choosing the File upload option, click the Next button. Then, by clicking the Upload button, pick the produced feed from your system.
Connect your Instagram business account to the Facebook Catalogue
If you have already set up the Facebook Catalog as discussed in the previous section, it is relatively simple to feature the products on Instagram Shopping. All you have to do is link your Instagram business account to the Facebook Catalogue option.
Follow the steps below to feature the products on Instagram shopping:
1: As suggested in the previous section, create a new Facebook Catalogue.
2: Connect your Facebook Catalogue and Instagram shopping with a Facebook partner.
3: From the Instagram app, log in to your business account after the Catalog and Instagram have been connected.
That’s how you can generate a feed for your products to be featured on Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shopping using the ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Feed plugin.
In conclusion, integrating your WooCommerce business with Instagram is a great approach to increase sales. Because the entire process is lengthy and includes multiple steps, we believe the catalog feed plugin will assist you in bringing your store to Instagram. If you have any questions regarding the plugin or Instagram Shopping, let us know in the comments section below.
To purchase the ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Feed Plugin, click here.
For step-by-step details on how to set up the ELEX WooCommerce Catalog Feed for Facebook & Instagram plugin, click here.
