It was about 10:15 p.m. when I finally got both Facebook and Instagram working with my Shopify store after a final 5 calls, multiple emails and 3 hours and 15 minutes on the phone just in the last day.
Who has time for that? Evidently I do. I’m like a dog with a bone. I wasn’t going to quit until I figured it out.
And now I want to share what got me hung up and how you can avoid the same serious frustrations.
Again, I want to commend the Shopify employees, as every single one of them gets a gold star. I mean one yesterday personally liked my Facebook page to try to help me out. I’m pretty sure that’s not only going above and beyond her job but also I’d bet there’s probably some stupid corporate policy that would have said no don’t do that. Small businesses let you personally help like that but big business usually frowns on that.
So when someone does that, it just gives you the idea of the high caliber of employees Shopify retains. They’re all trying. They’re all brilliant and caring. They just work for Shopify and not Facebook or Instagram. This is just one tiny albeit important part of their job.
At least one person told me a large part of their job is troubleshooting Facebook issues. I can see why.
Okay. So what exactly was the golden ticket yesterday?
First off, in Facebook I discovered that even though Shopify says that yes my store was ready in Facebook and approved, I still needed to go into Facebook and change a setting. That was clear as mud.
From my previous research, I saw repeatedly that you had to set your store to “shopping.” In the general tab, I did that when I set up profile.
However, there’s a whole new ball of wax to deal with once Facebook approved that shop and enabled it with Shopify. It’s not just a one click integration in Shopify.
Once Facebook has given you their blessing, you have to manually go into Facebook to Settings and Templates and Tabs and select Shopping. For no reason and in fact arbitrarily and wrongly, as I’d never touched this setting or seen it, Facebook had randomly decided my page is about “Movies.” Um hello. No. No, it’s not. Instead of leaving that selection blank, that seems to be the default setting according to a very high level tech person at Shopify who was also thinking that is crazy.
So I was mistakenly thinking I had addressed the whole “make sure you set your page to shopping” when I edited it under the general tab. No, this is a duplicate or different place to select the word “shopping” and you can only access it once your page has been approved by Facebook in Shopify. You then navigate back to Facebook and choose shopping.
Magically then, your “Shop” menu item appears on your Facebook page navigation panel on the left. What is misleading is the fact that they have this honking big “Shop Now” button at the top of the page which you can edit. It leads you to believe you actually have a shop enabled. Well, it’s technically enabled once approved according to the settings in Shopify. But if you don’t jump through this extra settings hoop in Settings’ “Templates and Tabs,” you don’t have a Facebook shop. Period. One click of that and everything worked. Instantly, all of my products appeared on my Facebook page.
Ok, great. I will say that it’s still like having a site on Mars because you can’t search my page name and find me yet in Facebook. You need at least 25 likes and who knows what all to even get an “@” name. You can’t verify your page with your cell phone. You need other fun things to do that like a utility bill or a sales tax number and you send that in. I haven’t jumped through those hoops yet as I wasn’t even sure I could get this thing up and running. For the meantime, I don’t have a vanity short URL, I have the Facebook page name from hell with about 20 random characters after my page name that looks more like a strong password than a page name.
But I’d read about all this talk of it being important that you’re the page administrator etc. and it taking a week to crawl your page etc., etc. and you know what. Didn’t seem to matter in this instance. I think that’s just one of the many rationalizations people make because nobody can make sense out of why things simply don’t just work.
So great, now if from within Shopify I choose the Facebook sales channel and click it, I no longer get an error message about the content not being available. The shop button at the top of the page masked the fact that the shop button on the left panel navigation was missing and had to be set up with that selection in Templates and Tabs. This is not intuitive at all people. It’s rather hidden.
So next I jump back on Instagram to see if I have now magically fixed what I perceived to be a problem.
Here’s the deal, in Shopify for the Instagram channel, they have a little drop down menu video of a phone running the Instagram app and what it looks like when you have connected and approved Instagram. There are little blue circles with white check marks for a catalog and a Kit app which integrates with Facebook. You choose between them I guess.
However, I just have one catalog that basically lists all of my products that was created just when I connected Facebook to Shopify and then Instagram to Shopify. So I’m looking at Instagram and I don’t have a check mark, I have a blue circle with a white dot and if I click on the catalog, nothing happens. It does not bring up a bunch of tags that are now enabled.
You’d think that’s how it would work right?
No. It’s not. It just is an un-clickable name of your catalog that appears there in your settings for your shop. It just says hey, here’s where we will pull from for your tags. It’s useless otherwise. No check mark is needed. The Shopify video of the Instagram app is misleading because it makes you think there’s an error if you don’t have a checkmark. The checkmark means nothing. The checkmark must appear when you have more than one business option for promoting within Instagram. I haven’t gotten that far. So if you have a blue circle with a white dot? You’re good. You do need to select it once as it starts off as like a grey color and you have to click it once to turn it blue, so you do have to navigate to it once your shop is approved by Instagram and Shopify lets you know. After that, you don’t need to touch it unless you add more things like the Kit app it seems as then you have to choose whatever it is you’re tagging from. I guess. As I say, I haven’t gotten that far. I’m assuming based on the Shopify video that that is the case.
So once you have got that little blue circle, you’re good to go.
Here’s what happens now. Every time you post to Instagram, you’re given a choice to tag an item from your shop, just as easily as you choose a filter. That is all you’ve been working so hard to enable. That is where you access your store items, in the actual post process. It has nothing to do with settings anymore after that last step of selecting the catalog. You don’t tag from the catalog. You tag from posts.
Seems simple right? Yeah it is if you have done it even once. But I hadn’t. And I’m a long time Instagram user for personal use. So let me tell you, I LOVE Instagram. It’s my favorite social media app. I love, love, love, love it.
But this experience? I feel like I need a breather. I should be doing the happy dance and celebrating that I finally got it all working. But I’m too drained to even want to touch it. I need a break.
The most I did was invite a few friends to like my Facebook page. I didn’t even go through my entire list of friends to invite everyone. I just don’t even want to think about Facebook or Instagram or Shopify for a bit.
But I’m relieved to know that when I get my mojo back, maybe I can finally start to get excited about my business again and focus on the important stuff that will make a difference in the world, not this behind the scenes API stuff that has just been dragging me down.
I can be technical if I have to be but it’s not my favorite thing. I have a bit of experience in coding. I’ve taken some courses. I’ve written a couple simple apps. I have a degree in ad/pr. I’m not an idiot. And if it has been this much of an ordeal for me, I can’t even imagine what it’s like for the average entrepreneur.
I’m still sticking to keeping this blog simple, so I’m not writing a bunch of tutorials here with pretty screen shot pictures because this is my stress relief. I’m not trying to turn this into another job. But I am trying to help. You are not alone in these frustrations.
These are tiny little things that make a difference. It’s not unlike when I’ve spent hours looking over code to find a typo. I know you can make this stuff work. You can. It just takes patience.
When I let go of caring but still tried to do the work is when it finally came together. I started the new name and the new Facebook and Instagram pages on Sunday. I got the thing set up finally on Thursday night.
But it feels like a lifetime. It was not fun. But it’s done. I really want to feel the excitement about my business again, so I think I’m just gonna leave it here for now but I wanted to document exactly what happened and what confused me or where I got hung up before I forgot to tell you. I hope this helps. I mean maybe I am an idiot. But I’m not the only one. This much I know from perusing Reddit, Google, Shopify etc. as there are tons of people suffering with these technical issues.
I’d gladly pay Facebook for customer service to help with e-commerce. I don’t want to trade my data. It’s not worth it being free. At all. But we don’t really have a choice in the matter because we have supported this business model to the point it’s a multi-billion dollar company. Now we are all paying the price. There’s no free lunch.