Facebook feed visibility problem and missing data

Hey @thedrap,

Thanks for getting in touch.

We’re certainly aware of the warnings regarding:

• google_product_category: A product is missing a field (699 products affected)
• variant_label: A product is missing a field (699 products affected)
• variant_value: A product is missing a field (699 products affected)

though we haven’t seen this affect the products being shown on your shop page or Instagram!

That said, the other issues that you’ve raised do sound like a cause for concern, as setting the visibility to “staging” for a product would not allow it to be shown in your shop. Having the description field be too short is the first time I have seen this error, though it should be possible to resolve for the 37 products mentioned from your WooCommerce store.

The security fix cannot be reverted at this time, though we are working on the next plugin release which will allow us to bring back these features with Facebook’s new API. I don’t have an expected release date for this just yet, as our developers are only just getting started.

As a test, in the meantime, would it be possible to delete one of the hidden (visibility set to staging) products from the Facebook Catalog, and then wait for the product to be re-synced?

And just to confirm, these products which are not showing, they are not Virtual products are they?

Cheers!

Simon.

Hi Simon! So glad I got someone to work with..

About the missing fields I can’t tell if that would make a product ineligible to display, I guess that as we are also dealing with the visibility issue one can be covering the other.

re: “Having the description field be too short” where did you see that? I couldn’t find any error description of the sorts, it would be great to know to better troublehsoot.
It would be great to fix it because it’s not 37 products it’s more than 400!
(454 products rejected)

Regarding the test you suggest I can do it, but I literally nuked the whole catalog on Monday (losing all my Instagram tags of course, which is bad already) and recreated the whole thing, re-uploaded all the items and yet, the 454 products mentioned above were rejected and marked as no visible.

To give you some context, all this was working flawlessly, until a week or two ago, not sure if coincides with the update of the plugin and all the security story but unless Facebook changed something in their requirements, i.e. more required fields we’ve not change anything and as you know I neither have control on what gets sent to FB from my backend.

Simon, I need you please to help me with this, these are hard times and we really can’t afford to have this handicap.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon, let me know if you need any log, or debug or screenshot, whatever you need I’ll provide shortly.

thanks !

Hi,

We have the exact same issue of visibility being set to “staging” and product description being too short – because it’s using the size as description, e.g. “size: Large”.

We hope there is a good solution to be found.

Hey @thedrap, @henrikdamdk!

The description warning I mentioned was from the excerpt mentioned earlier:
“description: Field Is Too Short (37 products affected)”

Though I think the key issue here is the visibility, rather than these other warnings, so I’d like to look into that first. I’ll still need a bit more information to troubleshoot further, however, as I am not sure what the difference is between the 454 products and the rest that are working.

For instance:

• Are all/any of these missing products Virtual products?
• Were they previously set to draft mode or hidden from the WooCommerce store?
• Did they previously have their visibility set to hidden in the plugin version prior to v1.11.0?

If you’d like me to take a closer look, I would need access to an admin login for your store to see what sort of data is stored against these missing products to see what we can do to resolve it. It would also be useful to double-check what the CSV looks like that is being generated to sync the products to Facebook as well.

In order to troubleshoot further on either of these last two points, could you raise a support request via our support form so that we can share credentials privately and securely?

Cheers!

Simon.

Hello Simon,
no problem, I will open a ticket right away. In the meantime here the answers to your questions:

Are all/any of these missing products Virtual products?
No, they are not at all.
Were they previously set to draft mode or hidden from the WooCommerce store?
No, they were not at all.
Did they previously have their visibility set to hidden in the plugin version prior to v1.11.0?
No, they were not.

As you can see all this was working before. We had around 300 Instagram postings with tags/sticker of our products and all those suddenly became disapproved and hence not shows. We started to receive notifications about that we had never seen before. No new products no nothing..

About the CSV where can I fetch that file? As the plugin handles the sync there are not many visible settings to play with. Is it in the plugin folder maybe?

Anyway.. as we are moving to a formal ticket, let’s continue the thread there.

Looking forward to it.

thanks!

Hi Simon and team.

I opened the case. However it would be good for you to know that I found the CSV in uploads and there they were all the staging records.

I’m adding this here in case it can help someone else..

Most of the Staging records are translations of my original English products. My site runs WPML multilingual for WooCommerce and therefore there are some sort of ‘duplicated’ SKUs but with different item ids.

Also among the offender records I see some sort of ghosts product that I guess I should clean up. So I would love any suggestion on how to do that.. for example products that are not associated to any language.

I will need an address to send the CSV for you guys to look.

thanks!

Hey @thedrap,

Thanks so much for contacting us directly, I’ve just replied just now so we can carry on investigating over there. Great detective work with the file, it sounds like WPML might be the cause for some of these visibility settings, so we can certainly look further at those.

@henrikdamdk are you also running WPML too?

Cheers,

Simon.

@skyverge thanks, no we are not running WPML, but we are running Polylang to support Danish and English in our case.

Should we also go ahead and open a ticket with you?

Thanks.

Hey,

I have the same problem, that products are set to “staging”. Even though they were never hidden. It seems that most of the translated products and variations have the visibility set to “staging”. When checking the translated product you get the following message: Heads up! Catalog visibility settings have been temporarily removed as we migrate to a more secure experience. To remove products from your Facebook catalog, please disable syncing to Facebook for the product. Learn more

So now I am here and I am reading that Skyverge has taken over the development. When will this issue be fixed?

Thanks!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by gg88.

egg88: Are you using WPML? If yes, there’s a setting in WPML for language visibility in Facebook. In my case, I set to have only english and that is why the feed marked the french translations as staging so they don’t show.

the problem is that Facebook is treating this as an issue.. since at least to me, it shows ‘red’ in the diagnostics tab.

Bottom line, it’s not a bug so check: WPML > Languages and look for the Facebook sync options usually near the bottom of the page

Hope it helps.

Hi @henrikdamdk,

We don’t have any specific compatibility included in the plugin for Polylang, whereas there is for WPML, which would be the reason for the products marked as staging. I would, therefore, expect all products to be synced to Facebook when using Polylang, though I am not quite sure how their translations work. WPML, for instance, creates new posts for each language. If you’d like to raise a request with us through our support form, we could take a closer look and see if there is anything we can suggest!

@gg88 thanks for joining the fun! ?? @thedrap is correct that if you’re using WPML for these translations, and they are not selected from within the options, then they will be set to “staging” (and hidden from your shop page) as standard. You may want to re-save this WPML setting to make sure it is active and try to sync again.

If you do run into further issues, or you aren’t using WPML, could you please let me know?

Cheers!

Simon.

@thedrap & @skyvergesupport thanks for the help.

Now, I don’t see the issue with the “staging”, but still I get errors that the description is too short. But this is clearly not true. How can I fix this?

Thanks!!!

Hey @gg88!

That’s great news! And thanks so much to @thedrap to help with support, it’s much appreciated.

As for the description issue, we’d really need to take a closer look at the WooCommerce store and the currently stored descriptions to see what might be happening here. I’d also then like to see what information is being created in the feed file as well for your latest sync.

To do this, we’d need access to your admin, and rather than share this publicly, it would be great if you could contact us directly to share this in private.

Could you please let me know when you have a moment to submit a request via our support form?

Cheers,

Simon.

Hello,
I am using Polylang and my products were all working till yesterday night that my store disappear. And all my products went to staging visibility. I don’t know now how to make them appear again.

Really strange.

How can I get some help

Hey?@cbrongniart,

Thanks for writing to us about our plugin! This got a bit lost on our end as it is a reply to an older post so I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. I’m happy to help you here.

I would like to have a closer look at your site to see if I can determine what’s causing the issue here. Would you please reach out to our support team through our site sharing admin access to your site along with a link to this post so I can take a closer look?

Thanks,
Tamara ??
SkyVerge