For your Facebook catalogs, with the feed, you can provide unique identifiers that are used to store and locate product information.
The following values will be used for the GTIN, with the value with the highest priority on the bottom:
- Shopify’s barcode on the variant level
- product metafield mapping rule
- variant metafield mapping rule
- metafield variant.flexify.gtin
We look at each product variant separately and take the first value that is filled. So it is possible that the value comes from different sources for different variants.
If the value on the Flexify product action page gets changed, it will be saved in the variant.flexify.gtin metafield.
You can also edit all products' attributes at once by using the Shopify Bulk editor link like so (please replace STORE_NAME with your Shopify domain):
If the value on the product action page gets deleted, the GTIN will not be included for the variant. The value of the variant.flexify.gtin metafield will be "-" in this case.
For some annoying errors like "The value of property mpn exceeds length" or "The GTIN is invalid", you have to make sure these don’t exceed 100 characters in length. Facebook product feed specs say the gtin, mpn or brand property should not be longer than 100 characters.
Also, if you are making use of Shopify’s barcode property make sure it is a valid Global Trade Item Number (GTINs). That can include UPC (North America, 12 digits), EAN (Europe, 13 digits), JAN (Japan, 8 or 13 digits), ISBN (books, 13 digits).
About GTINs and MPNs in general #
The logic this app uses to map your product/variant information to Facebook’s Product Feed format goes like this
- IF the variant has a barcode field filled out THEN use this barcode as the gtin property in the feed
- IF the sku field is filled THEN use this sku as the mpn property in the feed