Post Update!
So I'm still trying to navigate some issues that I'm still having using the Facebook Business Plugin. I use the AliDropship Plugin, not the WooCommerce version. The straight AliDropship version does not allow for SKU numbers so keep that in mind.
I used the "Google Product Taxonomy" list, supplied by AliDropship to categorize my products, I sell sunglasses so all my products fall into the same category. Once the Categories were selected, I generated the XML file, clicked "Copy URL" and then set up "Data Sources" in the Facebook Commerce Manager. I have 100 products, but after updating the Facebook Catalog, I see that I have 636 products, this makes sense if Facebook is considering each variation of the products as a separate product.
When I went over to the catalog using my PC desktop, I see that the catalog is displaying 82 products. When I checked the catalog on my iPhone I see that the catalog is displaying 26 products. In both cases, I had selected the "See All" option in the Facebook Catalog.
So now I go back over to Data Sources in the Commerce Manager and I see the yellow triangle with the exclamation mark in it telling me that there are issues going on. The first thing my attention is drawn to is the results of the last "Upload Session"
636 Products found in file
636 Products updated or added
0 Products rejected due to errors
0 Products removed
OK, so I take this as a good sign, but I still have these "alerts" on each of the uploads.
My next step is I click the "View Report" option. Facebook breaks down the errors in a number of categories and here where things start getting interesting. Facebook is faulting me on 5 items, in each case I'm being flagged for missing color and size. There are a couple of reasons I'm having difficulty with this.
- Each of my single products uploaded from AliExpress has multiple options within the one product selection. When you purchase any particular product on my website, it's true that you are selecting the color, but you're doing that from within the single product selection.
- Why are the other 95 products also not flagged, they're set up the same way
The next thing I do is go to "Commerce Manager > Catalog > Items" and I see "all" the products there, but not all of the products listed are populating in the Facebook Catalog. There are five columns that Facebook lists here as follows:
Item | Variants | Availability | Price | Content ID
ITEM
I see that Facebook has assigned a Group ID number to each of the products and the Product description name "does" appear under "Item" along with the thumbnail image of the product.
VARIANTS
I see Facebook has listed the number of variants that it see for each product and it does seem to be correct. I crossed referenced the number of variants showing on Facebook to make sure, there was at least one product that seemed to be showing nearly double the number of variants in the Facebook Catalog as showing on the website, but I believe this is because customers choosing this product are given a choice to ship from China or the United States and Facebook may be counting each choice of shipping origination as two separate products.
AVAILABILITY | PRICE | CONTENT ID
This seems to be where things are going wrong. Random items seem to have entries for these three fields. In each of these cases, the product is appearing as a single product "without variants", although in actuality all my products have variants. I'm assuming that somehow, the way Facebook is uploading the XML file, some variations of random products are breaking out and listing as single products. Further, these single non-variant products that are listing the three fields of Availability, Price, and a Content ID, seem to be the only ones that are appearing in the Catalog.
For each product that "does" show the number of variants, it lists the main product, shows the Group ID, but has no entries in any of the above three fields. If you click the drop-down arrow next to one of these products, the number of variants field is blank, which makes sense, but in each case, the three fields listed above are populating with each individual variant. I theorized that, because the main product listing, under which these variants are listed, does not have entries in these three fields, none of the variants show up in the Facebook catalog, but that theory went down the drain when I was able to find a product listed in the Facebook Catalog that also did not have anything in these three fields where it's located in the items list right above the variants.
As a test, I went back to WordPress and opened a random product for editing. When you go under "Product Options" > Attributes, you have a choice to "Split Product by this Attribute to create new items". I tried splitting one of the products apart into separate items, Generated a new XML file, and uploaded it to the Facebook Catalog. Each variant of the product "did" appear in the product list, but did not appear in the store.
Finally, I went back to WordPress > Products and opened one product that was listed in the Facebook Catalog, and one product that was not. I went through each and every setting to see if there is something I may have done with one product that I did not do with the other and couldn't find any differences in the settings. As a last resort, I even cleared the browser cache to make sure I was getting the most recent viewing of the catalog, but it made no difference.
I realize this was a lengthy post, but if someone has any ideas, or has experienced similar problems with this plugin, please chime in. I've been taking this step by step following AliDropship's instructions for setting up the plugin, but the problems seem so random they are hard to diagnose.
