Meta Checkout URLs

When a customer clicks on an item in your store directly from a Facebook/Instagram Shop product listing, they're redirected to a special URL that automatically prepares their cart before landing them on your store's checkout page. This guide explains how that URL is built, what happens behind the scenes, and how to test it.

What is this URL for?

Meta doesn't know your checkout system directly: when a customer buys from Facebook or Instagram, Meta generates a URL to your store that specifies which items are involved (and optionally a coupon code). your Eshop receives this URL, rebuilds the customer's cart with the correct items and prices, and then automatically redirects them to your standard checkout page, with the cart already filled in.

URL format

The URL follows this pattern:

https://yourstore.com/checkout-meta?products=ID:QUANTITY&coupon=CODE

Example with a single item:

https://yourstore.com/checkout-meta?products=1234:1

Important note: the IDs used (1234, 5678) correspond to the numeric item ID from your catalog feed (the id column in the feed, referred to as item.id) — not the listing ID. Don't confuse the two: this references the actual product/copy in stock, not the customer-facing listing.

The URL may also appear percent-encoded (%3A for : and %2C for ,) — this works exactly the same way, as the system decodes it automatically.

What happens when a customer clicks

1. The customer lands on /checkout-meta with the items in the URL.

2. The system creates a checkout session, identified by a technical cookie (checkout-id).

3. The customer is automatically redirected to your store's standard checkout page, with their cart already filled in and priced.

4. This redirect page is intentionally excluded from search engine indexing (it should never show up in Google).

If something goes wrong (item not found, empty cart, service unavailable): the customer is never left stuck on an error page. They're automatically redirected back to your store's homepage.

Two things to keep in mind

• A trailing comma in the item list is not a problem. This is actually a common behavior on Meta's side, which sometimes adds an extra comma at the end of the list: the system automatically drops it.

• The exact field names to enter in Commerce Manager (Meta's tool where you configure your catalog) may vary depending on the templates Meta offers. We recommend checking these names directly in Commerce Manager's built-in help rather than relying solely on this guide, since this detail depends entirely on Meta's own choices and may change on their end. What matters for common-ground.io is that the final URL follows the products=ID:QUANTITY,...&coupon=CODE format described above, regardless of which field names were used to get there.