Facebook Business Extension

Product Export

The Facebook Business Extension, v1 is currently only available to allowlisted Partners. Please contact your Facebook representative for access.

Requirements

Before you begin, you must decide on an approach based on the needs and technical base for your platform. There are 2 supported approaches for exporting your products to Facebook using the Facebook Business Extension:

  • Feed Approach (Pull)—This approach periodically generates a feed file with your products. Your plugin should create this file according to our developer specs and pass the URL of the file to the popup. Learn more about the Feed Approach.

  • API Approach (Push)—This approach directly uploads products through Facebook APIs. When a product is updated or added into the store, schedule an API call to update or create the product on Facebook. Learn more about the API Approach.

Currently, the API approach is in the process of redesign and is not an integration option for new partners onboarding to Facebook Business Extension. Please don't use this method for integration at this time. Any net new FBE integrations must use the Feed Approach (Pull).

Product Export Options

ApproachProsCons

Feed Approach (Pull)

  • No Facebook API calls or any API token.
  • The feed file can be used for other purposes.
  • Product deletion handled implicitly by omission from feed file.
  • Generating the feed file can take a large amount of computation time.
  • You need a periodic job to generate the feed or an endpoint Facebook can ping to trigger feed generation.
  • Products are out of date up to 1 day, unless users re-open the popup and click Fetch Now.

API Approach (Push)

  • Products are more up to date. When a product is updated, your plugin can immediately sync the product with Facebook.
  • Your plugin has to directly query Facebook APIs.
  • Frequently updating many items requires a lot of bandwidth.
  • The API token that FBE provides to you is permanent; you need to securely store it on your server.
  • Deleting products must be handled via API with explicit calls.
  • Certain APIs may change and be deprecated over time, requiring updates to your plugin.
  • The API token may become invalid (for example, if the user changes their Facebook password).

The other 3 requirements are more straightforward and development should follow the given code examples that appear in subsequent sections. See Magento example for an implementaiton overview.

Learn More