BigCommerce Quickstart
Shopview Introduction
Shopview is a Hootsuite app designed to make it easy to market and share products from your BigCommerce stores to your social media accounts. The app consists of both a Hootsuite stream and a plugin that you can use in Hootsuite Twitter streams. The app requires that you have both a BigCommerce store and a Hootsuite account.
1. Installation/Configuration
Shopview for BigCommerce is available in the Hootsuite app directory. When you add the app to a Hootsuite stream for the first time, you will be prompted to add authentication information:
Creating API store credentials
The following steps outline how to generate store API Credentials.
1. Navigate to Advanced Settings > API Accounts
2. Click the Create API Account button, and select Create V2/V3 API Token
2. Give the account a name
4. In the OAuth Scopes section, select the scopes Shopview requires:
5. Select Save at the bottom
After you have saved the API store credentials, a file with all of the settings will automatically be downloaded to your computer. Open the file, copy the contents, and then paste it into API store credentials box:
2. Using Shopview
Once you have added your shop, products from it will be displayed in stream:
Click the search icon to change what you view in your stream:
Stream types
There are two types of streams you can view:
- Products
- Social media comments
Products Stream
The Products stream allows you to view products from your shop filtered by category/keyword and sorted by popularity, date added and price:
In stream options
For each product, there are many actions you can take:
- Click the share
icon to share the item your social networks.
- Click the store
icon to view the product in your shop.
- Click the edit
icon to view the item in your shop's admin interface.
- Click the boxes
icon to view the product's variants, and to check if they are in stock or not.
When you click the share icon, you will be prompted to select a template, as well as have the option to edit the image:
Templates are saved text that contain merge tags. Merge tags are replaced with the selected product's name and link when you send a message. (see the templates section below for how to more about templates)
Clicking the Select Template & Edit Image button will display an image editor where you can edit your image prior to sharing it:
Social Comments stream
The Comments stream allows you to view and respond to comments made on your Instagram and Facebook accounts.
Click the to mark the comment "read". Click the
to reply to a comment. And, click the
to view the comment on the originating network.
NOTE: Before using the comments stream, you must authenticate the app on your social networks. See the settings section below for more info.
Replying to a comment
Clicking the reply icon, opens the reply popup:
Here, you can select the shop, the template to use for the reply as well as search for products in your shop. If you find a product you'd like to include in the reply, click the icon to merge it's info into the reply: (you must have merge tags, e.g. %name% and %link%, in the reply text for the merge to be successful)
Selecting Shorten links will use ow.ly to shorten links found in the message.
3. Settings
Click the settings icon to view the app's settings' options:
Social Networks
Click the Manage Networks button to setup your Facebook and Instagram accounts:
Shorten Links
The Shorten Links option allows you to choose whether to shorten links before they are shared to your networks. If you choose to shorten your links, your store's name will not be displayed in the link you share
Templates
Templates are used when you are sharing products to your social networks. They include merge tags that will merge the product name (%name%) and the link to the product (%link) when you send a message. You can use templates with both the Shopview stream sharing option as well as when sharing from a Twitter stream with the Shopview plugin. A default template is created when you first add the app.
4. Plugin
The Shopview plugin allows you to send messages in reply to tweets in Twitter streams. To access the plugin, click the More actions icon at the bottom right of any Twitter post, and then select Send to Shopview:
Next, a popup will appear where you can search for products from your store, as well as select a template to use when sending the reply.
5. Questions?
Have more questions? Please contact us at our support site.