Sell on Instagram | Shop on Instagram

It’s a very well known fact that the number of users on Instagram has crossed the one billion benchmark. These numbers not only represent the popularity of the platform but also the opportunities that it can offer to the merchants.

Instagram Shopping is a new concept & the company started its testing in November 2016. By the end of March 2017, the feature was available for businesses. And, with the incorporation of shopping feature on the platform, it has undoubtedly gained popularity among large & small businesses.

However, the functionality is still limited to only a few of the eCommerce platforms. But, these limitations don’t end the story here. There is always a way to do the things if you have a mindset to do it. While keeping in mind this useful feature, we have found a way for the Prestashop merchants, so that they too can sell their products on Instagram.

Hence, to provide the merchants running their business on Prestashop platform, the module will help them to sell their products on Instagram. After going through the steps explained in this document, you will be able to tag your products in your Instagram posts & stories. The customers can see the following things in your Instagram posts:

• Image of the product from your post
• Description of the product
• Cost of the product
• A link that takes them directly to your website, where they can purchase the product

So, without wasting a single more minute, let’s just dive into the process that how you can sell your products of Prestashop on your shop on Instagram.

• Sell your products of the store on Instagram.
• Tag products of your Prestashop store in your IG posts.
• Start showcasing your products in your posts for your followers of Instagram.
• Tag up to 20 products in your Instagram carousel posts to display product range of the shop.
• Create product stickers for your Instagram posts/stories. Stickers allow your followers to know more about the details of the product.

To set up an Instagram shop, make sure of the following things first.

• Check whether your business is located on the supported market or not?
• You must be selling physical goods at your shop.
• Your shop must comply with the commerce policies of Facebook.
• You should have a business account of Instagram.
• Make sure to connect your Instagram account with the Facebook page.

If you happen to qualify all the aforesaid criteria, then Voila!

Now you can proceed to install the module & setup your Instagram shop.

1. Go to Module Manager in Back office and click on ‘upload a module’.
2. Now, Drag and drop the module file or select the file from the system.
3. In this way, the module installation will be successful.

In order to configure this module, you must have the following things:

• API keys of facebook
• Access token
• Catalogue ID

In order to get the API keys & add new apps to the account, you need to create a developer account on Facebook.

Enter the display name and contact email Id to add a new app.

To view the app ID & app secret key, click on ‘Basic’ under ‘Settings’ menu. Now, you can proceed to enter these keys in the configuration settings of the module.

How to get user access token

To get the user access token, go to “Graph API explorer” under ‘tools’ section.

Now, Select the name of the app & provide catalogue management permission to the app to generate a user access token.

In this way, you can successfully get ahold of the access token.

The reason to create a product on the Facebook catalogue is that Instagram allows products of facebooks catalogue to be tagged in the Instagram posts. hence to do that, you must create a product catalogue & export your products of Prestashop store to it. The process to do that is explained hereinbelow:

To create a product catalogue on Facebook, go to catalogue manager & click on ‘create catalogue’.

Select the domain of your business & click on ‘Next’.

You must select ‘upload products info’ as the process to add products to catalogue. The reason to select the first option is that you can not connect your ‘Prestashop’ to Facebook yet. There is no option to select Prestashop from the list available in the 2nd option.

After clicking on next, you can see a new catalogue under ‘All catalogue’ list.

This was all about the process to create a new catalogue.

In this section, I’ll show you the process to configure the module.

Enter access token, app ID, app secret & catalogue Id to configure the module.

You can also enter the name & description of the default brand. This will allow you to export the products with no brand with default brand set by you.

As catalogue of Facebook has open API & Instagram allows the products of facebook catalogue to be tagged in Instagram posts/stories. Hence to achieve the functionality, you must send the products to the Facebook catalogue.

To export your products to the Facebook catalogue, you also need to sync your categories of Prestashop with google taxonomy. The reason to sync/ map category is that Facebook only identifies the google categories. So, let’s see the process of mapping the categories.

To send the products to Facebook, you must map the category of your store with the Google category. Mapping of the category is very much important as these products need to be in one or the other category.

Hence, to put the products of your shop in the right category, you must map the categories of your shop with the google category.

Select the category of your shop & the google category to map them with each other.

You can also view the list of all the synced categories under ‘Sync google category’.

To tag the products in your Instagram posts, firstly you need to send these products to facebook catalogue. These products are sent to the same Facebook catalogue ID entered by you in the configuration. To ensure the products are being sent to the right catalogue, you must tally the catalogue ID of the Facebook with catalogue ID set in the configuration settings.

To send the products, search by their name pattern & select the products to send them to the Facebook catalogue.

After sending the products to the Facebook catalogue, click on ‘refresh product list’ to view the imported products to Facebook.

Now, select a catalogue from the dropdown to view the products & their status of the upload in the catalogue.

While exporting the products to Facebook, multi-language feed of the data is also exported.

Click on ‘Products’ to view the products exported to Facebook catalogue. To view more details, click on the product.

After clicking on the product. Now, you can view the details of the product.

Now, when you have an Instagram shop & you are ready to launch your shop. Then you can proceed to connect facebook catalogue with the Instagram business account. This will allow you to access all your products on Instagram.

To connect your catalogue with business account

• Go to catalogue manager.
• Select the e-commerce catalogue to connect with your Instagram business account. Make sure that it must be a catalogue for products.
• On the Use cases page, select Instagram Shopping and then Connect profile. Instagram shopping option only appears if you have an eligible e-commerce catalogue.
• Select Add a new Instagram Business profile.
• In the pop-up window, log in to your Instagram business account.

In this way, you can successfully connect your Instagram account with the Facebook catalogue.

After going through the aforesaid procedure, now you can tag products in both new and existing posts from your Instagram professional account. You can tag up to 5 products in a single-image post and video posts, or up to 20 products in a multi-image post.

To tag the products in posts of your Instagram:

• Tap the products in the photo that you want to tag.
• For videos, a tray will appear where you can select up to five products you want to tag.
• Enter the name of the products you want to tag & then select them as they appear in the search box.

You can also click on the link to know more about Instagram Shopping.

For any kind of technical assistance, just raise a ticket at http://webkul.uvdesk.com and for any doubt contact us at support@webkul.com