The deployment of your ShopTab Facebook Store with your ProStores site has been streamlined with the recent the ProStores software update in release 10.3.2. Follow these instructions and your store will be operational in a few minutes.

1)     Activate your Prostores ShopTab Data Feed inside of your ProStores admin console under Marketing>Traffic Generation>Comparison Shopping. (Note: We recommend using the brief description setting for the feed since it will streamline the layout inside of the Facebook page)

  2)     Select the ShopTab plan that works best for your Facebook page - http://www.shoptab.net/pricing-and-features. Complete the registration and store set-up process defined in the PDF that will be sent to your email address or follow the instructions in the installation video.

 3)     Copy and paste the designated URL on the ProStores screen above into your ShopTab admin console under Data Feed section and in the Scheduled Updates area at the bottom of the page. Make sure to click the schedule button to activate.

The ProStores feed can take up to 24 hours to activate with your products. Your store will be stocked once the feed is available with products and the ShopTab data feed has uploaded the file based upon the designated Monday weekly upload in the Standard or Expanded Packages and the daily/weekly time of day and day of week schedule option in ShopTab’s Ultimate Package.

Below are lists common questions from ShopTab users that have the ProStores Data Feed integration.

1) Why is my description formatted with empty spaces and strange formatting?

Currently the ProStores user has the ability to select between two different descriptions to send in the ShopTab feed. One is called “Brief Description” which is meant to hold a brief description of the product for our Search Result pages and it typically doesn’t contain a large amount of HTML formatting. The other is simply called “Description” which is meant to hold a more comprehensive description of the product that’s used on the Product Detail page and more than likely will contain a good amount of HTML formatting. It may be a quick fix for some merchants to switch over to use the Brief Description in the ShopTab feed.

2) I want the categories to be in an alphabetic or a special order in ShopTab but I can’t figure out how to make that happen with the automated Data Feed, how can you I do this?

The merchant currently has the ability to download the feed file from ProStores, open it in Excel (or some other editing tool) and sort the data in whatever order they’d like. They would then re-upload the edited file back to ProStores via FTP or ProStores’ File Management area. The way it is re-edited would create the category order in the Data Feed for ShopTab.

 3) My feed is activated but it isn't working because products are not showing up in ShopTab's Facebook Store.  

It could be one of a few issues:

A) Your products aren't uploading because you don't have a "Description" value defined for any/all of your products. One of the rules ProStores enforces when they insert products into the ShopTab feed file is that they must have a description value. By default, ProStores is configured to pull the description from the products longer "Description" field.  If the longer description doesn't exist for any of your products, it  will omit the products from the feed. You may select the brief description field to download to your facebook store.

B) Your products must be assigned to a category in your store.   The merchant will have to assign their products to a category in order for them to be included in the ShopTab feed file.

C) You need to have images loaded into ProStores for all of your products. If you don't upload an image for each product the download from ProStores will not include the file transfer.

D) If your inventory setting is turned on and the product is set to 0 the product will not appear in the download.