How to unpublish items on Facebook shop but leave them in Square inventory?

[weloveart]

I need some advice about offering select items for sale through our Facebook and Instagram shops, instead of our entire Square inventory.

I manage the gift shop at our local art gallery. We currently have a Square online store through Weebly which allows us to select certain items from our inventory for sale online. We are in the process of photographing and cataloging our store inventory for online sales, although we have hundreds of items, so we are doing it in batches.

The store is physically open, so we need our entire inventory to stay in Square for physical sales.

I only want to have certain items available for sale on Facebook and Instagram. I found a way to link our Square store to our Facebook Shop through Weebly, but it then makes our entire inventory available online to our page followers.

Is there a simple step I'm missing to unpublish the unwanted items on the Facebook shop but still have them available in our internal Square inventory?

[weloveart · Accepted solution]

OK, so I just figured out how to do this!

I have been using "featured items" section modules to list select items on our Square online store home page.  Unbeknownst to me, I didn't realize that our entire inventory was available online through the Square store using the search feature, so online shoppers could type in glass or ceramics or books, etc, to see a selection of whatever inventory we had.

So...now I have to go into EACH item and mark it as either hidden or unavailable. Hidden hides it from the search, but you can still send a link to hidden items to customers; this is great for custom sales.

Unavailable, leaves the items in the Square inventory, but makes them not searchable through the site, which is exactly what I was trying to do. So an unavailable item will still show on my Square terminal and I can ring through physical sales in the store, but the items won't be available online until I choose.

Now I can relink my Facebook and Insta shops...once I update the 400 shop items that are currently unavailable... >_<

[weloveart]

And...it looks like there is the option to batch change availability once multiple items are selected! Yasss!

[nika]

@weloveart Go you! Glad you were able to figure this out. And thanks for sharing your experience just in case someone else is going through the same thing. This is now a great resource for the next person! 🎉