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:

1. Products
2. 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. 

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