Meta Commerce Catalog
A Meta Commerce Catalog is the structured product feed that powers Meta's shopping surfaces — Facebook and Instagram Shops, product tags in posts and Stories, Advantage+ catalog ads (formerly Dynamic Ads), and WhatsApp catalogs — built and managed through Meta Commerce Manager. Sellers upload it as a CSV, TSV, XML, or XLSX file via scheduled URL fetch, one-time upload, or the Catalog API, populating required fields like id, title, availability, price, and image link alongside a product-category taxonomy that can use Google's taxonomy or Meta's own `fb_product_category`.
What the catalog actually feeds
One catalog, created and managed in Meta Commerce Manager, can power several distinct surfaces at once:
- Facebook and Instagram Shops — a storefront presentation of the catalog
- Product tags in organic posts, Reels, and Stories
- Advantage+ catalog ads (Meta's current name for what were formerly called Dynamic Ads) — ads auto-generated per item from the catalog
- WhatsApp catalogs — a lightweight product listing surface inside WhatsApp Business
The catalog is the data layer underneath all four; a bad or stale feed degrades every surface built on top of it at once, not just one.
Feed format and delivery
Meta accepts a catalog feed as CSV, TSV, XLSX, or XML, delivered one of three ways: a scheduled fetch from a URL (hourly, daily, or weekly), a one-time manual upload, or programmatic updates through the Catalog API. A seller can run more than one feed against the same catalog — a primary feed plus country-specific, language-specific, or supplementary feeds — and Meta matches rows across those feeds by the id field, so an id that doesn't match exactly between a primary and a supplementary feed won't merge.
Required and high-value fields
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
id | The item's unique identifier — must match exactly across all feeds for that item |
title | Product name |
description | Plain-text product description |
availability | In stock, out of stock, etc. |
condition | New, used, refurbished |
price | Current price, with currency |
link | URL to the product page |
image_link | URL to the primary product image |
brand | Brand name |
google_product_category / fb_product_category | Taxonomy classification |
The taxonomy field is where product taxonomy work pays off directly: a distributor already mapping SKUs to Google's product taxonomy for Google Shopping can largely reuse that mapping here rather than building a second one from scratch.
Where it breaks for multi-channel catalogs
A distributor feeding the same product data into Meta alongside Google Merchant Center and other channels tends to hit the same few failure modes:
- Taxonomy mismatch.
google_product_categoryandfb_product_categorydon't always map one-to-one, and leaving Meta's field blank to rely on the Google one isn't a reliable substitute. - ID drift between feeds. A supplementary feed built from a different export than the primary feed introduces IDs that don't match, so updates silently fail to merge.
- Disapproved items. Items missing a required field, or using restricted language in the title or description, get disapproved individually rather than failing the whole feed — easy to miss without checking the diagnostics in Commerce Manager.
Frequently asked questions
What file formats does Meta accept for a Commerce Catalog?
CSV, TSV, XLSX, and XML. Feeds can be delivered through a scheduled URL fetch (hourly, daily, or weekly), a one-time manual upload, or programmatic updates through the Catalog API.
What's the difference between a primary and a supplementary catalog feed?
A primary feed is the main product data source for the catalog. A supplementary feed adds or overrides specific fields — for example, country-specific pricing — for items that already exist in the primary feed. Meta matches rows across feeds by the id field, so the two feeds must use identical IDs for the same items or the merge won't happen.
Does Meta Commerce Catalog use Google's product taxonomy?
It can. The catalog supports a google_product_category field alongside Meta's own fb_product_category field, so a taxonomy mapping built for Google Shopping can often be reused rather than built twice — though the two taxonomies don't always align one-to-one at the category level.
Can one catalog feed Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp at once?
Yes. A single catalog created in Meta Commerce Manager can power Facebook and Instagram Shops, product tags in posts and Stories, Advantage+ catalog ads, and WhatsApp catalogs simultaneously — it's one data layer behind several surfaces, not a separate feed per surface.