Please read the "What is a TSL Shoppette?" article before reviewing this article.
Overview
You’re now up to speed on the 101 on TSL Shoppettes. Since your Seller account meets all the prerequisites, you’re ready to start using this powerful feature.
Let's get into it!
Shoppette Creation GIF
This is the TL/DR version. We recommend you use your desktop device (running macOS or Windows) running Google Chrome to create and manage your Shoppettes. 🖥️
Shoppette Creation Guide
Video
- Upload a 9 x 16 video that is between 15 and 90 seconds long. See the screenshot below these bullet points for all requirements.
- Note: If your video does not meet the requirements, you can replace it later.
- Please wait while your video finishes uploading. Once complete, you will automatically be taken to select the products you want to add to the shoppette.
Note: When we process your video, we will include an ephemeral image overlay that states "Made shoppable by TalkShopLive" in the first 5 and the last 5 seconds of your shoppette on social media. This is to ensure your audiences know the video has shoppability.
Products
A maximum of 5 products can be attached to a Shoppette. These products must be from your store-channel and cannot be reordered.
Once the Shoppette is published to a social media destination, the products will appear in the commenting user’s direct messages, sorted by product ID. Affiliate products from the influencer’s store-channel can also be included
Note: The order of your products determines how they appear in DMs to users who comment “SHOP” on social media.
TSL Shoppette Details
Create a title, description, and hashtags for your Shoppette. The description and hashtags will be auto-inherited in your social media destinations. You can tweak the language for each social media destination as you see fit.
Note: Descriptions have a limit of 1,800 characters, and hashtags are capped at 400 characters to comply with social media platform restrictions.
Social Media Destinations
Each Shoppette can be published to up to 8 social media destinations (e.g., Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels) and will remain shoppable for 7 days after publication.
You can customize each social media destination’s post individually. Since Facebook and Instagram support different features, functionality may vary. For example, including “@talkshoplive” in your Instagram caption will auto-tag our account, but on Facebook, it will appear as plain text.
By default, all shoppettes are stored in TalkShopLive and will be enabled once we enable the feature in our platform.
Important Notes:
- Collaboration posts are not supported on Facebook or Instagram with this functionality.
- If your Instagram Reels are automatically shared to Facebook Reels, the shop functionality will not carry over to Facebook.
- Facebook Cover Photo: Refer to the guidelines for the Facebook cover photos for reels. You will need to upload a cover photo once you publish the shoppette to social media. Most Facebook pages do not have the feature to edit the cover photo after posting. The cover photo is auto-selected from the first few frames of the reel.
- Instagram Cover Photo: Custom cover photo specifications will be in the tooltip in the upload flow at this stage.
Important Notes for Meta Platform Configuration
Before going live with your Shoppette or simulcast, ensure the following settings are correctly configured on Instagram and Facebook to enable messaging and comment-triggered shopping:
1. Confirm Message Reply Settings
Path: Settings and Privacy → Messages & Story Replies → Message Controls/Requests → Connected Tools
➤ Ensure “Allow Access to Messages” is toggled ON
2. Confirm Allow Comments Settings
Path: Settings and Privacy → Comments
➤ Ensure “Allow Comments from EVERYONE” is selected (applies to Posts & Reels)
1. Enable Messaging from the Business Page
Path: Business Page → Dashboard (Blue Button) → Left Sidebar → How People Find and Contact Me
➤ Ensure “Allow people or pages to message me” is toggled ON
Notes:
✅ Triple-check these settings on mobile the day of your show.
🚫 Shop comments will NOT function unless these settings are enabled!
Publishing your Shoppette
When you publish a Shoppette, it is distributed to the following destinations:
- TalkShopLive: Shoppettes will appear on the TalkShopLive platform. Note: The Shoppette player will be gradually implemented across TalkShopLive throughout 2025.
- Facebook: If a Facebook page is configured as a destination, the Shoppette will be published as a Facebook Reel.
- Instagram: If an Instagram for Business account is configured, the Shoppette will be published as an Instagram Reel.
Ensure destinations are properly configured to maximize visibility and engagement. Other platforms will be rolled out in due time.
While publishing to social media, your draft shoppette will go into publishing status. Given that we're publishing the shoppette across multiple platforms, this publishing state can take a while. Whilst we've built shoppettes to be robust in this publishing state, there are a few known errors you might encounter with social media publishing to Meta platforms. These errors are:
- Upload error
- Processing error
- Copyright error
For the upload and processing errors, which can happen on any chosen destination across Facebook or Instagram, our software will give three opportunities to re-attempt publishing the shoppette. Once these three attempts are exhausted, we will ask you to remove the destination and publish without it.
The copyright error means your shoppette was successfully published; however, your audio was struck down due to copyright reasons. You then need to select a new audio track for your reel via Instagram's approved tracks list. Note that this error is not fixed inside TalkShopLive's shoppettes management but through Instagram's digital properties.
The TSL Shoppette on Social Media
Once successfully published, your shoppette will live in TalkShopLive, Facebook, and Instagram. In the future, we'll expand the number of external destinations to which you can publish your shoppette.
Throughout 2025, we will be weaving the shoppettes throughout TalkShopLive's digital properties.
In Meta's ecosystem—Facebook and Instagram, to be specific—the shoppettes will live as reels. They will be distinguished by the ephemeral image overlay that will pop up in the first and last 5 seconds of the reel. The image overlay states that the reel is "Made Shoppable by TalkShopLive." The Made Shoppable by TalkShopLive trademark is our signature way to let your audience know that there is a neat shoppability mechanic in the reel. All they have to do is comment, "SHOP." Please ensure to give your audience a heads-up that they have to comment "SHOP" to get a DM to the products associated with the reel.
Below is a mock-up of the image overlay in action!
After 7 Days of Shoppability has ended
After your 7 days of shoppability have ended, we recommend you tweak the language of the shoppette to highlight that the reel is no longer shoppable on social media. Be sure to link users to your TalkShopLive store-channel so they can explore the latest from your hybrid storefront and video channel experience.
Inside TalkShopLive, shoppettes will always be shoppable. Once your products are out of stock, in our systems, we will ensure to highlight that the products are no longer available; however, we still value the video entity of the shoppette as worthy of being perused by users in our marketplace.
Deleting your Shoppette
For a wide variety of reasons, you might want to delete the shoppette. You will be able to readily do this for the TalkShopLive and Facebook destinations. However, for Instagram, you will need to go to your Instagram account and manually delete the shoppette.