Facebook & Instagram Shop Descriptions

Hi there

I've linked my Squarespace Commerce site to my Facebook and Instagram via the integration data feed.  Everything pulls through correctly bar the description, which loses all formatting and is condensed into one rather messy paragraph.  Is there an easy way to fix this, please?

Many thanks

Chriss

I’ve got the same issue and it’s really annoying me. I read somewhere you need to enable the Rick text field in Facebook commerce but need to check it out more. 

Same issue. I opened a ticket about this with Squarespace and it sounds like the feature request has been raised to the development team, but no ETA on when (if ever) it might get fixed (assuming it actually is an issue on Squarespace's side that can be fixed, and not a bug or missing functionality on FB's side).

I did some digging and best that I can tell (thought I'm not a developer) is that Facebook's spec for the data feed fields contains two separate fields, one that supports rich text (rich_text_description) and one that's plain text without formatting (description). According to the spec for the rich text field: "If this field is provided, it will display instead of the description field wherever possible, but you must still provide description as a backup option." I assume if rich text ends up in the plain text field all the formatting is stripped (which looks like what's happening).

My guess is that the issue is something along the lines of: the product description from Squarespace is being pushed only to the plain text field (maybe that is the default option if nothing is specified) so should instead be pushed to both fields, or maybe the Facebook service/API that Squarespace is using doesn't support pushing programmatically to the rich text field so that's why it's not happening (this would be a limitation then on FB's side and not much Squarespace can do about it unless it's added). Assuming the latter isn't the case, my guess is a code update on Squarespace's side would in fact be needed to fix this. But I very well could be missing something.

I did contact FB support about this too but received basically no help from them; to Squarespace's credit their support team has been cordial, helpful, and at least acknowledged it looks like there is an issue. So I suppose there is hope!

Sources:

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/120325381656392

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2302017289821154

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/rich-text-in-description/ (sounds like similar issue and the suggested fix mentioned is for the code that's pushing the content to be updated, which is what leads me to believe that's the case here too)

I should also say that I looked through Facebook's commerce settings as well to see if there was some way to enable rich text (like @niteshifte suggested), but couldn't find anything like this. One of the things I brought up with their support, but of course received basically no help on it so that ended in a dead end.

I too contacted FB support and I have to say it was laughably bad! I wouldn’t mind but I was on with them for at least 2 hours to end up no where. I then contacted SquareSpace support and they also said it was a feature they’re working on and will roll it out when ready. I then read that instagram and Facebook are pulling back from commerce to focus more on video so I’ve kinda parked this. A fix would be amazing but I won’t hold my breath.

Would you mind sharing where you read that FB is "pulling back from commerce"? I hadn't heard that and I'd be curious to get some insight into their thought process/intent (e.g. would they ultimately remove shopping options down the line?).

While you are probably right that the prudent thing to do is not hold my breath, I do hope this get's resolved as I would like to finally get an Instagram shop for my business. Let's see!

Yeh no probs: https://retailleader.com/instagram-pulling-back-shopping

Looks like it is official with Meta/FB/Instagram changing some things in the ecommerce department: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1164525704208548

Not sure what this means for integration between Squarespace and FB. Maybe nothing, since it seems the only change is now we will no longer be allowed to "Checkout on your website" and be forced to switch to "Checkouts on Facebook and Instagram." I guess FB wants to charge a transaction fee and get a cut of all those sales. Not surprised I guess, but will be kind of a pain since I assume we'd have to manually manage/split inventory between Facebook's ecommerce platform and Squarespace's.

I wonder if there's a way to share inventories between these two platforms, or if that's something that could be made part of the integration. Would certainly simplify inventory management a whole lot. Hopefully it is on the docket and I wonder what Squarespace's plan is for all this.

For what its worth, I also think the issue about the descriptions formatting being stripped might actually be because the sync happens behind the scenes using a CSV file (when I paste the feed URL provided by Squarespace into my browser, it downloads a CSV), which can't really store rich text. So even if it makes it to the right field in Facebook's database, it has already stripped out the rich formatting before when it was put into the CSV.