How does product descriptions for Shopify work in Shogun?
As the name suggests, the product descriptions for your Shopify products is simply put the description for the product that would explain what a product is, its features, benefits, and why it's worth purchasing the product.
Shopify explains more about product descriptions with some useful examples of good descriptions that is worth checking out.
Before we talk about product descriptions, we need to learn about how product pages work in Shogun.
For product pages, you can create a product page in Shogun by clicking on the Add Page button in your Shogun dashboard and then selecting the page type as PRODUCT. You can then select the name of the product to get started.
Or, you can simply search for the PRODUCT in the Dashboard and click the import option to import the product to Shogun.
Once you have chosen one of the two options of creating or importing your product page (s) to Shogun, you will have the option to select the product page layout. There are two product page layouts to select from. These are, Existing Layout & Custom Layout. Let's talk more about these product layout options.
Existing Layout
The existing layout pulls the product form from your theme and allows you to add additional content using 3 dropzones presented in Shogun. These 3 dropzones are, above, main, and below.
Custom Layout
The custom layout is a blank page with a product box assigned to the product you selected. You can use product box elements along with other drag and drop elements to design your page.
When you use the existing layout, the main dropzone is where your product description will appear. However, since the page is now imported to Shogun, we recommend making all the changes/updates to your page within Shogun. This also applies to the product description. In-fact, when you create a page in Shogun, or import a page to Shogun, we recommend making all the changes and updates to your pages within Shogun. Making changes to such pages outside of Shogun can cause parity issues where you might notice your pages have lost their styling. They would then need to be republished within Shogun again to resolve the issue.
Product pages, product descriptions, Facebook, Instagram Shops & Google Ads
As we discussed above, the product descriptions explain about your products, their features, benefits, and why it's worth purchasing these products. Apart from the usual Sales channels on Shopify, you can also configure Facebook and Instagram shops to be a sales channel for the products.
Facebook Shop
Facebook shop is a sales channel that can be configured in Shopify. Once set, Facebook will create a Shop section on your Facebook Page that displays your Shopify products.
Instagram Shop
Instagram Shopping connects the products that you have in Shopify to your Instagram business profile. Your Instagram profile visitors will be able to shop products directly there
When you create a Facebook Shop or an Instagram Shop, the product descriptions that you add in Shopify work without an issue and are displayed as it as for the these channels. This is because when you add product descriptions on Shopify they are added as plain, simple text that allows Facebook, Instagram, and Google to read the content of the product description.
However, when you import your product pages to Shogun, Shogun allows you to add dynamic content such as images, icons, videos, GIFs, etc to your pages using our drag and drop elements. This also means, you can add such content using our elements to the main dropzone of your product pages where your product descriptions usually are. When you add such additional content to the main dropzone/description of the product page, you might notice some Shogun code appearing in the product description when the product is viewed on Facebook/Instagram Shops or while using Google Ads.
The reason why you notice some code appearing there is that these services would be grabbing the first content they find in the main dropzone, of the product page. If you are using elements such as an image/icon or other kind of content Facebook/Instagram Shop will only expect the basic HTML to display the description and not the complex components that Shogun includes on the page to display the this additional dynamic content you added (the images, icons, videos, etc).
Apart from this code, you may also receive a character limit alert for your product descriptions when you add additional content to the description using Shogun. One such alert would require you to have a description shorter than 10000 characters.
As we discussed above, for Shogun-edited product pages, the product descriptions have custom content in them, which causes the page to exceed this character limit. Most 'standard' product descriptions are just that, a description of the product. Shogun pages, on the other hand, have custom code and content published to the content areas so that you're able to have the dynamic layouts and pages you want without needing to customize the theme itself.
This is also the reason why some Shogun pages may show code similar to the screenshot above on the Facebook/Instagram Shops and Facebook/Google Ads. This isn't a problem of Shogun having a bug or not supporting an app. The Shogun Page Builder is simply publishing your content to the page's content area but the Facebook/Instagram Shop integration doesn't understand custom content and just looks at the page as if it were a standard Shopify product description.
We do understand the concerns about the inconvenience this may cause. There are a couple of workarounds to resolve this.
Disable Product Description in Shogun
We can disable Shogun from making changes to the product description of your products going forward. This means you will be able to edit all your product descriptions in the Shopify dashboard and you should be able to see the same description appearing in Facebook/Instagram/Ads shops as well.
You can add a text element (with enough text) to the top of the 'Main' dropzone. This text element can be set to be hidden on all devices using our Screen Visibility Settings feature. This will prompt Facebook/Instagram to pick the content inside this hidden text element as the description.
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