My Facebook Small Business Nightmare

When I invested in a small retail startup early in 2021, I never imagined that offering to help get the social accounts and paid media setup would be one of the single most frustrating experiences with the vast expanse of Facebook bureaucracy I've ever experienced in my entire life.

As someone who has spent much of the last 10 years of my life in one way or another fully invested in using tools like Facebook and their vast ad network to grow businesses, I volunteered for this task confident we would be a Facebook success story. Boy, was I wrong.

For a company that has been fighting the public perception that it is simply too big to effectively manage, policy, and function, and after spending tens of millions of dollars promoting how it helps small businesses, my experience has not been exactly inspiring, to say the least.

What follows is my experience attempting to use Facebook's Business Manager to manage the ad account and business assets for a small business here in Brooklyn called Boisson.

The Store — Getting Started

Boisson is a non-alcoholic spirits, wine, and beer store. We don't sell alcohol. In fact, we do the opposite of selling alcohol. We offer people an alternative to alcohol, which—let's be honest—many of us need after the last year. We sell brands like Seedlip (available on Facebook), Curious Elixirs (also available on Facebook), and Ritual Zero Proof (you guessed it, also available on Facebook).

If you're familiar with Facebook's Commerce and Ad policies, may already be saying, "ahh, I know what's going on," and you'd likely be right. Shortly after launching the brand, we used hyper targeted Instagram ads to build a nice local following within one mile of the store. We grew our Instagram to about 900 followers, and were seeing fantastic week over week growth rates.

I'd created a Facebook Business Manager account with our Company details, our LLC information, d/b/a info, etc. and connected our Instagram and Facebook accounts, as well as done some pre-connection work to ready our online store, hosted by Shopify.

Launch — Or Not

Everything was going well until we launched our online store, and prepared to open to the public, on Feb 25, 2021. When I flipped the switch and sent our products through to our Commerce account, all hell broke loose. Every product, from our non-alcoholic wine, to our glassware, was flagged by Facebook's automated filters, as alcohol. You read that right— our glassware was flagged as alcohol.

This started a cascading effect that basically destroyed everything. Once Commerce account items were flagged, they caused our Ads account to be flagged, and before you know it, too many ads were disapproved, and then our ads account was shut down for violating policies (which, of course, we weren't). Then came the next nightmare.

Business Verification — Automated Responses and "Concierge Support"

All of these cascading issues prompted a demand for business verification. We started this process on February 25, 2021. They asked us to provide a number of legal (and frankly very confidential) documents to verify our business. So we uploaded our Articles of Incorporation, our NY State Certificate of Authority, Bank Statements, our Cable and Power Bill from our retail store, along with the first page of our lease. After providing all of those documents, we waited. Five days later, we received the following response:

You'll note from above, we submitted all of these documents, but one (our bank statement), was still understandably coming to another mailing address. Many businesses have a physical location, and a mailing address. So we submitted more documents with the business address. And then, on March 2, we got this response.

YAY! We're real in Facebook's eyes!

Except we weren't. Nothing changed on our account. The message said we were verified, but our case still showed pending. So we reached out to find out why. Over the next MONTH, we asked four times to get an update. No response.

Facebook 'Concierge Support' — Not Exactly

Over the next two months, we had SEVENTEEN chat and email conversations with Facebook support. We got canned responses about how we should wait for 24-48 hours (it had been a month at this point), then that we should wait for 3-5 Days (it had been almost two months at this point), then someone told us in a chat we should just give up and start a new business manager account because maybe this one was just "stuck".

The best/worst part about all of this was that not a single time did any of these 'Concierge Support' team members ever use any critical thinking to see that our situation was one that might require a human touch. At every single turn, canned responses were provided. When we wrote to say we'd gotten a previous canned response, they'd respond with another canned response and then say that "since we solved your issue, we're going to close out the case".

Internal Teams, Internal Processes

Every time we attempted to try to appeal to a human being, to their better angels, to see that this situation was one that we'd been going around in circles on for three months, they would default to the same thing: our Internal Team has to complete your review, and we can't contact them, see their support tickets or case IDs, or connect you with them.

What caused all of our products to be rejected in the first place? One rep told us "it's a computer vision program that looks at it, and these look like wine, so that's what did it." When I asked if we could have a human look at the product, with a product title that includes NON-ALCOHOLIC in the title, where the product page lists the ingredients and the description clearly states that the product contains no alcohol. "Sorry, our internal processes are automated" was the response.

What do we do?

I've tried reaching out to people I or my connections know at Facebook. I've tried every route of customer service and support that is available (no phone, just messenger chat), I've tried following processes. We'd planned to spend almost $3,000/mo on the Facebook Ad Network promoting our business. Our initial ads performed extremely well, and many of our customers actually said that the reason they'd found us in Cobble Hill was because of our Instagram Ads.

We've now been open for three months. The business has grown incredibly thanks to amazing neighborhood support and foot traffic, and we're getting ready to expand to two more locations, both in Manhattan. It's a NYC/COVID/Small Business Success story! It's what Facebook talks about when they run ads like this one:

Boisson IS a Good Idea that deserves to be found. But with automated systems, and everything on Facebook being seemingly decided by computers, without giving support employees even an ounce of trust necessary to intervene when the humans get it wrong, we're not going to be found on Facebook or Instagram anytime soon.