For over 6 months we’ve been placed in the eternal loop with Shopify customer service and Facebook customer service. Absolutely no one on Shopify or Facebook’s end wants to take accountability for this issue that hundreds of thousands of people are having; and this issue is finally coming to light in large numbers.
The problem: Instagram can’t recognize that your connected Shopify catalog and products are on your website. We get rejected from the Instagram shop and product tagging system with the error message “Product Unavailable on Your Website”, when indeed our products are ONLY on our shopify website.
Some notes:
•All settings are correct between shopify and Facebook business manager and Instagram, we can easily confirm this because…
• Facebook customer service verified all settings are correct 26 times.
• Facebook shop works just fine and allows tagging (which is “very odd” to Facebook customer service they said)
• Facebook will not solve the issue, they will hurry to get you off the chat/phone by telling you that it needs to be escalated. Once escalated you will get a generic email (or no email) that states the obvious “your instagram shop was not approved because your products are unavailable on your website”.
• Shopify has even worse customer service regarding this issue. They also will tell you that the issue is escalated and you will get a more generic email that states to contact Facebook.
I’ve contact Shopify 26 times regarding this issue in 6 months. I contacted Facebook 56 times.
Why I believe its an issue with Shopify?
Because a temporary repair was posted on shopify community here: https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/instagram-shopping-denied-product-unavailable-on-your-website/td-p/1013219
If changing the domain to the shopify domain fixes the issue then that means that Shopify is somehow corrupting the connection of the primary (custom) domain to Instagram. I assume instagram uses domain DNS settings to verify that the inventory is available on the site. Til this day, years later, there is still no permanent solution to this problem, and both Facebook and Shopify will do everything they can to end communication with you so that they can send you a generic message stating nothing useful at all.
I suspect that Shopify may know this is a major issue that will cost them millions after users leave their service, maybe that is why they’re trying hard to hide it?
My option:
For those Googling “is Shopify the best e-commerce platform” or “pro’s and con’s of Shopify” I want to tell you to run as fast as you can from Shopify because this is your future. Here is the nightmare that is about to happen due to our decision of working with shopify:
• We are going to have to spend THOUSANDS to move our store away from Shopify because of this issue that was never resolved in 6 months. No one is taking accountability and no one is helping.
Others have experienced this problem and found no solution years ago like this Redditor
https://www.reddit.com/r/shopify/comments/m7stgg/shopify_instagram_shopping_products_unavailable/
Before using Shopify just Google “Product Unavailable on Your Website - Shopify” first to see the problems you’re going to experience. Until this issue gets permanently resolved so that we can use our private domain WHILE still being able to update our inventory in real time, I recommend not using Shopify or you will lose thousands.