One of our clients recently brought to our attention an issue that apparently has been plaguing Facebook/Instagram many stores since like 2020 that Facebook and WooCommerce still have not fixed:
All products show out of stock on Instagram even though they are in-stock on WooCommerce.
In particular, he had a lot of Printful > WooCommerce > Instagram Store products that are created by Printful, added to WooCommerce, and Syncd to Facebook for their Instagram store. Yeah that’s a mouthful. Well, after going down the Facebook Business Manager and Wordpress plugin support forum wormhole full of unhelpful staff telling people to uninstall all plugins and themes and test (the biggest cop out on the WP forums which nobody likes), we’ve identified the issue and can fix this on any Rocket Ivy site pretty quickly now – so if you are experiencing it please report it and we’ll have a tech put a custom fix in your site for you.
The Root of the Problem
It comes down to a couple different things –
- The issue mainly affects stores that use the “Facebook Checkout” option instead of “Checkout on Website”. – Problem is, Facebook has now basically discontinued the second option to check out on your own site, so now they require their checkout option, which then causes this issue, because:
- Facebook invented and uses a pretty poorly documented field now called “Available for Purchase”, and defaults it to 0 when it’s not set. – You can see this field in Facebook Business manager for any item that you have in your store, and see what it’s set to. If it’s set to 0, which is what it’s doing by default with WooCommerce sync it seems, then the product shows as out of stock, even if the other field “In Stock” is set to true.
The Fixes
- Business Manager Manual Fix: Yes (but that sucks) If you go into Business Manager and find your store items, edit them, and set Quantity Available for Purchase to 1 or greater, save it, and check your store. You will see it is working again as it should have. But, this would require you to do this for every product! There are some bulk editing options in Facebook, but that sucks to have to do, and there are some other alternatives that would eliminate manual entry.
- Custom Code: Yes! There are various ways to attempt fixing this issue, and it may vary somewhat between different sites as to the exact reason your products are having this issue, but it most likely is this Available for Purchase field. Depending on if you use Simple Products, Variable Products, have Inventory numbers to set, or inventory is not important beyond just being “in stock” or not, the solution may differ somewhat for you. Ultimately, if you have the ability to program a PHP snippet, you want to make sure that whatever missing fields there are get set to valid quantities when syncing to FB.
Business Manager Feed Rules? Nope. Unfortunately we tried every suggestion within the settings of Facebook Business Manager and there is no way to set a custom feed rule for a “app” integration like WooCommerce, like you used to be able to do with custom XML or CSV feeds you set up yourself… so there’s no fix there. If you use CTX Feed Pro or one of those “old ways of doing it” you actually do have this feature, and should be able to set the field for quantity available for purchase with an override that way – but that sucks too, since Facebook for WooCommerce is the official integration plugin now.
Need Help?
If you need help fixing this, we’re happy to implement a fix for you! Just get in touch via support ticket or chat, and we’ll get it patched up in no time!