Product Catalog
Before buyers can purchase items from you, you'll need to upload your products information into a Facebook Product Catalog. If you advertise with Facebook Dynamic Product ads, you already have a Product Catalog and should augment your existing catalog. If you do not have a Product Catalog or do not want to reuse an existing one, you can create a new E-Commerce catalog using the Commerce Manager.
Product Catalogs are managed within your Facebook Business Manager. Your Marketing department may already have set up a Business on Facebook to manage their Ads campaigns on behalf of your organization and should be able to provide you access. If you do not have a Business Manager on Facebook, you can create one now by following the instructions from our Help Center.
Manage Catalogs
Products are created, updated, and deleted using the following approaches:
- In bulk by uploading a Product Feed file, manually or scheduled in Commerce Manager
- For existing products, update product inventory counts using the Product Catalog Batch API
The product feed (inventory) should be provided in one of the supported formats (CSV, TSV, RSS XML, ATOM XML).
Product Attributes
A catalog is a structured data file that holds information about the items in your inventory. Each row in your catalog represents an individual product (unique size/color variant). Each column in your catalog represents product attributes such as title, description, image, ... You can see the full list of attributes and their requirements here.
| id | title | gender | size | color | inventory | price | item_group_id |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
0475-S | T-Shirt | Unisex | S | Black | 35 | 7.43 | 0475 |
0475-M | T-Shirt | Unisex | M | Black | 125 | 7.43 | 0475 |
0475-L | T-Shirt | Unisex | L | Black | 12 | 7.43 | 0475 |
0883 | Shorts | Unisex | 3 | 26.55 | 0883 |
Product Data Sources
There are multiple ways to populate your catalog. The most common approach is to list all your products and attributes into a flat file using one of the supported formats (CSV, TSV, RSS XML, ATOM XML), and upload it as a Catalog Feed.
After you've created your Product Catalog, you can create one or many Product Feeds to update or replace product items in your catalog. Product Feeds can be uploaded manually or automatically using a schedule (hourly, daily or weekly). Two types of schedules are supported for a given Product Feed:
- Replace Schedule: to refresh your entire feed. Items not present in the feed file will be deleted.
- Update Schedule: to make changes to selected items in your feed.
Most businesses will set-up a Replace Schedule once a day, and configure an Update Schedule more frequently to make incremental catalog updates.
A Product Catalog supports one or multiple Product Feeds. However, a given product (identified by the id field) can only exist in one Product Feed at any time (product IDs are unique to feeds).
Read more about how to set-up your Product Feed in the Catalog Set-Up section.
Real-time Updates
In addition to manual or scheduled uploads, we support live updates of specific product fields using the Product Catalog Batch API for near real-time updates. This approach is programmatic, and mostly used to update stock-related information for fast-selling product items.
If you have a fast-selling inventory and feel that the hourly update cadence of Product Feeds is insufficient for your particular case, you can de-couple updating general product attributes from volatile fields such as inventory and availability. Read more about the different inventory update strategies currently supported.
Diagnostics
Because Product Feed uploads are asynchronous operations, there may be situations where one or many products fail to be updated without you knowing it. Errors may be caused by various reasons such as missing or incorrect product attributes in your data source. It is important to regularly check the status of your Product Feed upload, and fix potential errors.
You can check for upload errors using two different approaches:
- Manually: regularly check the Diagnostics view of your Product Catalog. This view will show warnings and errors for each Product Feed upload sessions. You can also download error reports for offline analysis.
- Programmatically: build an API integration to automatically report warning and errors based on your Product Feed upload sessions. Read the Catalog API Error Handling section for more information.
Next Steps
Learn more about the supported catalog fields that describe the type or category of commerce products in your listing.
Learn more about the universal basic attributes to use in your product feed.
Learn more about the product categories to use to enhance your catalog.