Facebook and Instagram Shops - No more option to checkout on your website

Hi All,

For those who sync and connect their Squarespace e-commerce store to Facebook and Instagram Shops, how are you handling the changes by Facebook/Meta to no longer allowing users to checkout through your Squarespace site? 

Facebook no longer allows "checkout on your website" since June of last year and after April 24th of this year (so in a month and a half or so) all sites using this option will be disabled. Here are some links about this:

• https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/27/instagram-facebook-force-checkout-experience-shops-soon/
• https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1164525704208548

I contacted Squarespace support regarding this, and they are telling me only "checkout with your website" is supported, but I was kind of surprised to hear this as this option is no longer supported by Facebook. Squarespace support directed me to the following support article: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001257067-Selling-products-on-Facebook-and-Instagram#toc-manage-your-shop-on-facebook-and-instagram

So I guess I'm a little confused and surprised that there doesn't seem to be a solution so close to the deadline. I don't have the option to go back to "checkout with your website" in Meta Commerce Manager and this won't even be allowed after April 24th (all shops using it will be disabled), but Squarespace tells me that this is the only supported way to integrate my Squarespace store with Facebook and Instagram Shops?

My main concern is syncing inventory, as I manage that centrally in Squarespace and don't want to have to manage two separate inventories for Squarespace and Facebook and Instagram Shops. 

Any suggestions, advice, or best practices here would be much appreciated!

Thanks.

Actually my stock with Facebook/IG stop syncing with Squarespace. I have been chatting with Squarespace and they keep telling me it should work. They don't seem to know that it's the old system and not working anymore. You have to update manually your stock on Facebook/IG. now. 
 

Shopify and other platforms however is working properly with Meta. Very disappointed right now with Squarespace.

Thanks for the reply. Glad to know I'm not the only one facing issues with this feature. I second that this is very disappointing to hear--it certainly seems like they have quite a lot to fix up with this, as well as scramble to figure out a solution before the Facebook cutover. Too bad that an advertised feature has so many issues, but hopefully they can get it all fixed up and have a good solution soon.

Bumping this one up and having the same issue as mentioned above. 

I am unsure what actually happens during FB/IG checkout in regards to the order. I'm using a drop-shipping service through my squaresoace shop, but I'm dubious that checking out with FB will actually route back to the drop shipping company. Any ideas? It seems like a lot of moving parts 🙂

21 hours ago, RonanD said:

I am unsure what actually happens during FB/IG checkout in regards to the order.

Yea I feel exactly the same way. I don't have enough confidence that everything will work as expected, like everything is sort of cobbled together and prone to issues.

While I can't speak exactly for your use case of routing order information to your drop shipping company, depending on what they need to fulfill and order, you might be able to forward the order notification from Facebook to them, assuming Facebook sends one (which I'm not sure why they wouldn't). Maybe you could set up an auto-forwarding filter in your e-mail to handle this. I don't think orders made via Facebook Checkout would appear in any way in your Squarespace Orders screen, but I don't know for sure.

In terms of inventory management, my understanding is that if using Facebook Checkout, your Facebook/Instagram shop is essentially a completely separate store, with its own inventory and order fulfillment process. Thus an order made from FB/Instagram would trigger (I assume) a notification from Facebook that you have a new order, then you need to fulfill it however you do that. It would then decrement the inventory in Facebook's system by one (or however many items were purchased) and the cycle would continue.

Except that Squarespace is syncing data at a regular clip from your Squarespace store to Facebook, including, as far as I can tell, inventory counts. My understanding is that this is a one directional aka Squarespace overwrites everything in Facebook and nothing is sent back to Squarespace from Facebook. Thus, inventory management would have to be adjusted manually in Squarespace for orders made from Facebook. An order would decrement the inventory count in Facebook's system, but unless this is also somehow (I assume manually) decremented in Squarespace, that would be overwritten when the sync happens and inventory counts would get all messed up.

That's basically where I'm stuck--seem to be quite a few gaps. I think a two way sync would largely solve this problem, but maybe that is not technically feasible.

Small addition I'll add: according to Squarespace's documentation, regarding inventory counts, only "Availability - Whether or not there's at least one of the product in stock." is synced. However, in my Facebook shop catalog, I can see that the inventory counts for my items were synced from Squarespace, so perhaps this functionality was added and the documentation was not updated to match yet.

I have been writing these dip-shits for 5 months. Our store is not syncing with META. and the worst part, the orders stuck in META can't be processed... so i can't get paid and I can't ship the orders out b/c the button to do that is "greyed" out, allowing me to do nothing except manually change my inventory and email the customer and tell them it's gonna take 1-2 weeks longer to ship their items.

I keep getting a variation of this to any response I send:

I have 100 emails since DEC. all like this and very little help at all, and the problem is still on-going... I'm shocked that a trillion dollar company can't solve this issue in 5 minutes let alone 5 months! I will be disconnecting my business from META and they will no longer get any money off my orders. There's no other solution at this point... 

Trying to contact squarespace support again! 😞 They HAVE to solve for this with such a huge issue for so many!

My problem is my inventory will not show up on meta - did anyone run into a solution at all without manually changing for your whole catalog of products?

Well, its April 25th, and no update from Squarespace on their support page for syncing products with Facebook and Instagram: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001257067-Selling-products-on-Facebook-and-Instagram

Yea this is a bit frustrating. The feature is still available and advertised, but it clearly is just broken now.

@ValentinaJ Honestly I think at this point the only real "solution" --if you can even call it that--is to disconnect the sync and just maintain the stores and inventory separately. According to Squarespace, inventory counts are not synced. But that is all moot anyway since the only method of checkout that is supported by Squarespace is if Facebook lets you checkout on another website, but that option is no longer an available or supported by Facebook as of yesterday so... we are all kind of stuck in limbo as far as I can tell.

I just disabled my stores in Facebook/Meta Business Manager in hopes that Squarespace figures this out soon, but I'm not holding my breath...