2

I exported all the tags required by Facebook from my third-party online store (Lightspeed) and the data stream works as expected in terms of automatic updates, but products on my facebook page shop (Shop tab) are displayed with the brand name first — L'Oratoire Saint-Joseph — followed by the product title.

Two products with brand displayed first, one product without

See it live : https://www.facebook.com/osaintjoseph/

The unfortunate result is that the text under many products is exactly the same. Is there a way to display the Product Title before the Brand Name?

Lightspeed support told me I had to take it up with Facebook. I am awaiting their reply. See my questions in the fb developer forum here : https://developers.facebook.com/settings/developer/community/

Splambo
  • 144
  • 1
  • 13

1 Answers1

1

There are 3 ways to add products to Facebook Shop:

  1. Manually
  2. Data feed (e.g. CSV import)
  3. Third party plugins (which you’re using).

Manually – the user is only able to enter 4 properties; title, description, image & variant. See facebook.com/business/help/293945421560847. There is no concept of product brand.

Data feed – this allows for additional properties, such as brand name. In the table, see example files and select product (csv, tsv or xml) facebook.com/business/help/120325381656392?id=725943027795860. However it looks like all Facebook does is concatenate string, that's the product title becomes "{brandName} – {productName}". It look like brand name is not used anywhere else. Nor is there an option to change the way it's displayed. If you edit the product, you should be able to see this in the Product Title.

Shop tab (third party plugin) – (May be it's me, but I found their documentation hard to follow) – They send an XML feed to Facebook support.shoptab.net/hc/en-us/articles/200583466-XML-Feed-for-Facebook-Storefront-with-ShopTab. They do not appear to have a concept of brand. Try and examine the data. I would expect the brand name to appear in the product title. Alternatively they allow for CSV, which also doesn't contain brand name support.shoptab.net/hc/en-us/articles/200583906-CCNow-Integration-with-ShopTab-s-Facebook-Store-App

Summary

  • If possible, examine the data that is sent from Shop tab to Facebook.
  • Try and find out if you’re able to exclude / alter the string concatenation of brand name from product title in Shop tab. If not raise a support ticket with them.
  • Alternatively see if you can manually edit the product title in Facebook. It’s not a long-term fix, but helps understand how the system are integrated.
Greg
  • 4,468
  • 3
  • 16
  • 26
  • Thanks for the effort, Greg! Although your answer doesn't give me an authoritative 'No' (and clearly not a 'yes' either), I appreciate the details and clarity you provide, and I have opened a differently-phrased question on Facebook's developer forum, and to Lightspeed's support team as well. I didn't even know a plugin called 'Shop Tab' existed; I was referring to my Facebook page's tab called 'Shop'. Thanks for the research and congrats on the bounty. – Splambo Jul 14 '20 at 16:07
  • Everything points to Lightspeed sending the brand name (which is not a required field) across to Facebook. If they omitted the brand, then that would solve part of the problem. What you really need, is to be able to create a Facebook friendly product name (in Lightspeed) either manually or with rules. It's unlikely they'll build it. Therefore you might want to do some research into uploading products (to Facebook) throw a bespoke data feed, – Greg Jul 15 '20 at 20:12
  • Lightspeed generates an RSS feed that includes all sort of product information, and they tell me it's possible to modify that feed. I haven't found a way yet (I'm not a dev so the learning curve is steep with these things:) but I'll look up bespoke and keep looking for how to modify this feed emananting from LS: 24318062 <![CDATA[ Chandelles Tradition / Tradition Candles Cierge blanc ]]> <![CDATA[ Chandelles Tradition / Tradition Candles ]]> – Splambo Jul 16 '20 at 15:42
  • It looks like the RSS feed "title" is the Facebook product name. Creating a bespoke RSS feed shouldn't really take an hour or 2. However without any experience in dev, you'll probably best find someone to do it. (It would make a perfect project for a student). You'll need to have a think about how to get the data from Lightspeed, how this code will be called, where it's going to be hosted (assuming you don't want to run it every time on your local machine) (the free Azure or Google cloud function should be sufficient for you). – Greg Jul 16 '20 at 21:54