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!