Facebook Shop Warning

G'day,

I've been working with lat9 to link my Zen Cart site to Facebook Shop using a Facebook pixel.

I started the process by manually added about 20 products to see what would happen.
A day ago we added the Facebook pixel enhanced code to Zen Cart. We're now in the process of checking and handling any issues.

You should be able to see the result so far at https://www.facebook.com/scubadoctor

Facebook has a page to check the microdata being generated.

I asked it to check the product...
https://www.scubadoctor.com.au/diveshop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=3949

It seems we're good for OpenGraph and JSON-LD.
It didn't report anything for Schema.org

It reported a warning...
Warnings
Products are added to your catalogue without key information that impacts your ad campaign performance.
Warnings
These fields have missing information: google_product_category
Make items easier to discover by providing google_product_category information.

I wasn't aware of these Google product categories, but found this…
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324436?hl=en

When I was manually adding test items to the Facebook Shop, I was asked to select a category. The one I used for all of them was…
1135 - Sporting Goods > Outdoor Recreation > Boating & Water Sports > Diving & Snorkeling

From the list it seems it's possible to be way more specific about the category for each product, but we have no way of doing this from Zen Cart.

So what should we do?

1. Ignore the warning and just keep not providing a category for each product?

2. Prove the same high level category for all products, as I've done for the manually added Facebook Shop items?
   I'm concerned that this approach may upset the way Google and others are already allocating more accurate categories to products automatically based on their comprehensive taxonomy information.

I just don't enough about this stuff.
Has anyone here already tackled this issue while adding a Facebook Shop updated from Zen Cart using Facebook pixel?
What did you do and why?
What do the SEO/SEM gurus here think we should do?

Best regards, Lloyd Borrett

will someone help i also need this info. thank you

We're just about to start this process for our site; we were told that the products could be managed manually (hell no) or by using the automated method below. It consists of:

1. adding "fbq('track', 'ViewContent');" to each product page
2. adding microdata tags to each product page
3. pasting this code into the <head> section of the home page "<meta name="facebook-domain-verification" content="abc123" />

We already have a Facebook pixel so I'm slogging through Meta's pages seeing how to integrate this new catalog related code.

I believe this plugin will add the code required.
https://github.com/torvista/Zen_Cart-Structured_Data

Thank you Torvista, really interesting.