A Meta catalogue is a structured list of the items you sell, stored in Commerce Manager, that Facebook and Instagram can read to build ads and shop pages automatically. Each item has an ID, a title, a price, an image, a link and its stock status.
How a catalogue works
Most catalogues hold products, but Meta also supports other types for travel, property and vehicles, each with its own fields. A product catalogue needs a handful of fields for every item: a unique ID, title, description, availability, condition, price, link to the product page, image link and brand. Prices carry a currency, so a UK shop lists them in GBP.
Items reach the catalogue in one of several ways:
- A product feed file (CSV, TSV or XML) that Meta fetches from a URL on a schedule.
- A partner integration, such as Shopify’s Facebook and Instagram channel or a WooCommerce plugin, which keeps the catalogue in sync.
- Manual entry in Commerce Manager, which only suits a very small range.
- The Meta Pixel reading product details from your pages, which is convenient but harder to control.
Once items are in, you can group them into product sets, such as “women’s coats under £150”, and point ads at a set rather than the whole range. The catalogue is also connected to your pixel and Conversions API, so Meta can tell which products each person viewed, added to basket or bought.
Why it matters for a UK business
For an online shop, the catalogue is what makes Advantage+ catalogue ads possible: ads that show each person the products they looked at, or items like them, without you designing an ad per product. A shop with a few hundred lines cannot build that by hand.
It also means the ad is only as good as the data. If the catalogue says a jacket costs £89 and is in stock, but the site says £110 and sold out, shoppers click, feel misled and leave. Meta may also reject items whose details do not match the landing page, which quietly shrinks what your ads can show.
Common mistakes
- Running two sources at once, such as a Shopify sync and an old feed file, which creates duplicates or overwrites.
- Prices in the feed that exclude VAT while the website shows prices including VAT.
- Item IDs in the catalogue that differ from the IDs your pixel sends, so behaviour cannot be matched to products.
- Low-quality or cluttered images, or images with large text overlays, that look poor in a carousel.
- Leaving items marked “in stock” after they sell out because the feed only updates weekly.
How to act on it
Open Commerce Manager and check three things: how many items are in the catalogue compared with your live range, how many have errors or rejections, and when the data source last updated. Then compare a sample of items against the live product pages for price, availability and image.
Choose one data source and remove the others. Set the feed to update at least daily if stock moves quickly. Finally, check the catalogue match rate in Events Manager, because a catalogue the pixel cannot match to is only half working. If you would rather hand this over, I set up and run catalogue and dynamic product ads for online shops.