Before buyers can purchase items from you, you need to upload your products information into a Facebook product catalog. If you advertise with Facebook dynamic ads, you already have a catalog and should augment your existing catalog. If you don't have a catalog or don't want to reuse an existing one, you can create a new ecommerce catalog using the Catalog 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 don't have a Business Manager on Facebook, you can create a catalog in Catalog Manager.
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. See the full list of attributes and their requirements.
| 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 |
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 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:
Most businesses set up a Replace Schedule once a day, and configure an Update Schedule more frequently to make incremental catalog updates.
A 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).
Learn how to get started with your catalog setup.
In addition to manual or scheduled uploads, we support live updates of specific product fields using the 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 decouple updating general product attributes from volatile fields, such as inventory and availability. Read more about the different inventory update strategies currently supported. See
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:
