CS-Cart is one of our favourite eCommerce platforms to work with for many reasons, but mostly because of the SEO benefit. However, because it is more niche than some other eCommerce platforms, Facebook has yet to create a CS-Cart partner integration such as you can find with Shopify, Magento and other leading eCommerce providers.
A partner integration means that Facebook can sync with your eCommerce platform, automatically pulling in your online store’s information: products, stock, price, images, and storing them in your Facebook Catalogue.
What’s a Facebook Catalogue?
Facebook Catalogue is a feature on Facebook that holds information about the items that you want to advertise or sell across Facebook and Instagram.
Integrations are beneficial because:
ONE:
You don’t have to upload and update your products manually
TWO:
If you have a store with thousands of products, variants, or maybe a store where stock changes frequently, then it can be hard to keep your Facebook catalogue up-to-date.
Facebook Catalogue Solution for CS-Cart
Our client, www.f1authentics.co.uk, took our advice to start advertising through Facebook – and without a simple integration, we had to think outside of the box to sync the website to the catalogue.
Facebook gives you a few options, but unless you are a Facebook dev expert, they aren’t very straightforward. We set up a data feed source that updates the catalogue every night. This meant our developers had to create a file that has precisely the right fields and make sure it was set to re-generate every night.
While it did take some time to set up, and there were some bumps along the way, the feed has been updating for a couple of months now with no issues. Not to mention we’ve run successful ads & set up a shiny shop on the Instagram account where you can browse all of the products on the catalogue (without leaving Instagram!).
So, if you are a CS-Cart user and have been waiting for Facebook to come out with an integration to launch your shiny social ads – you can stop waiting! ExtraDigital is well-versed in all things CS-Cart and social. Get in touch with our team, and we can help sync your CS-Cart website with Facebook and create amazing social campaigns together.
