For the last few months I’ve had the unenviable task of working out why a clients Shopify store has been rejected by Facebook. This should be a simple task, but more often than not it takes more than a considerable amount of time.

If you’ve had this before, you totally understand my clients frustration with trying connect both Facebook and Instagram.

So once you’ve connected your personal account you should go through to connecting your Commerce Account. If you haven’t created a Facebook Commerce Account, especially in all the situations I’ve seen, having a Commerce account helps to easily decipher what has happened with your Facebook /Shopify connection.

But please do not be tempted to and I quote three of my clients here ” start all over again” or “quit everything and start from scratch”. Facebook has strict rules on duplicate accounts and you don’t want to get into hot water as one of my clients did by creating a second account in their name. Another client ended up locked out of their account as they couldn’t remember the password. This all happening during the 2020 pandemic so getting human help from facebook was virtually impossible for a little while. All we could do was wait and hope that they would review the account …eventually.

Please Note – You haven’t done anything wrong. One of your products or your whole account has been flagged and we need to find out why

So hopefully you’ve got here. You’ve created a page and set up your ecommerce account to manage it. Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that Facebook will automatically review and approve your account.

As mentioned in previous posts I have had a small business before, for which I also used Shopify. Faceboook rejected my account for having a product that was a sexually explicit. This was news to me as I owned a Cosmetics store. The product in question was my “Whipped Body Butter” I guess the bots that check through the applications saw ‘whipped’ and ‘body’ and flagged my product as inappropriate. It can really be as simple as that. God forbid you should try to sell underwear for larger women to promote good self image.

So if like so many others you get here and Shopify tells you, you’ve been rejected. Head over to your Facebook Commerce/Business Account , In the Side Menu on the left click on ‘Account Quality’

Which will take you here

Click on the Catalog associated with your store page. You should see the image below

This should have a list of your products that have been rejected. with a note saying why they have been rejected , ‘Medical devices’ (Bandage Dresses) ‘Overtly Sexual Content'(Whipped Body Butter) or perhaps you’ve broken an ‘Advertising Policy’. You can request a review of each product or remove them from the Facebook Channel on your store and add in the notes of the review that they are no longer in your Facebook feed.

Once this is all completed you can request a review of the entire store by going back to Account Quality and Commerce Account and clicking on ‘Request Review’ explianing that you have made changes to your product feed and why you think the store needs to be reviewed.

In the case that you cant find why your store has been blocked. A quick chat with Facebook Concierge Support is really useful.

A real person can have a very quick look and unblock your store straight away in these ambiguous cases. Shopify help is not useful as the real problem is in the Facebook ecosystem so speak to Facebook if you really get stuck.

Not saying I have all the answers but I write this from my experiences over the last 2 years of figuring Facebook Shopify connections

Good Luck!

Modifications to Shopify 2.0 Dawn theme to create this store for Joliette London. Created Product tags and a Logo List Banner. Added a Dual Banner with Buttons to the Hero Image and very small edit to Image with Text to make it full screen. Some of these required editing the component classes. I created a gallery for the product page, add an instagram module and pop up newsletter with MailChimp Integration.

Today I spent some time really getting to know the Shopify CLI and Shopify 2.0. I worked through, figuring out all the new parts of Shopify 2.0 and the changes to metafields are everything! Adding a metafield in a template means that you can add have the same field but different content on the same template. I think there is actually more to the templates than that but I haven’t started experimenting with how they work just yet.

I used a Development Theme I called PartySplash and added some assets to it. I also added an upstream branch in Github so that I can get any new updates.

I set up ShopSync as many of my current clients have MailChimp and I’ve not had time to really experiment with it. After a good while I figured out there must be an issue with the base.css file, something to do with div:empty that was affect the close button on the MailChimp pop up, it was showing as display:none, so there was no way to close the pop-up. I added some specific CSS for the Mailchimp pop up close button ( display:block) and that seemed to finally sort it out for now but I know I’ll have to go back to that and look around at the issue further. I recommend looking at Klaviyo if you are just starting out.

I really wanted a sticky header but again I found that this only worked on the scroll up. I encountered this before on Narrative, so I’ll be spending tomorrow rebuilding this, while waiting for the official update. It will give me practice.

Everything else seems to working great so far, my new favourite thing is the way the blocks work. I added reviews to the Products page and it really took all the hard work out adding apps to pages and creating and modifying templates on the development theme was so much easier.

Another thing that took a little while to get my head around was shopify theme pull vs shopify theme push. If you have an existing theme that you are editing ‘push‘ used to overwrite the settings_data.json file, so Shopify added a fix so that it no longer pushed the setting file up to the live (or dev) site. The problem was that if you had a brand new theme and you wrote the code on the Development environment and then tried to edit anything the customise window, now that the settings file wasn’t being updated you would need to do a ‘push’ (with your code) and then a pull ( with the settings_data.json file). Another fix was that I could use two different git branches and then merge them but that got messy very quickly so I found that it was easier to push then pull.

Hopefully I’ll be able to tell you about my first app in my next post.

Site created for a beauty school. Some fresh design looks created.