If you sell through Google Shopping or a Meta catalog, your products reach those channels as a product feed. This guide explains what a feed is, what one row of it looks like, why its quality matters and where merchants tend to go wrong.
What a product feed is
A product feed is a structured list of your products that you send to a sales or advertising channel. Each product is one entry, and each entry is a set of named attributes such as title, description, price, availability, image link and brand. The channel reads the feed to build your listings and ads, so the feed is the channel's whole picture of your catalog.
A concrete example
Think of a feed as a spreadsheet where every row is a product or variant and every column is an attribute. A single entry for a pair of running shoes might look like this.
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Title | Men's Trail Running Shoe, Blue, Size 10 |
| Price | 89.00 USD |
| Availability | In stock |
| Brand | Your brand name |
| GTIN | The digits under the barcode |
On Shopify you rarely build this file by hand. A sales channel app usually reads your product data and passes it to the channel, which means the feed is as good as the product records behind it.
Why it matters for a store
The channel cannot see your storefront the way a shopper does. It works from the attributes you send, and it checks them against its own rules before showing a product.
- Eligibility: Entries that break a channel rule can be disapproved
- Matching: Titles and attributes help the channel decide which searches a product fits
- Accuracy: Price and availability in the feed are expected to match your product page
Common mistakes
Feed problems usually start in the product record, not in the channel. Fixing the source data fixes the feed on the next sync.
- ❌ Titles that leave out the brand, product type or key attribute
- ❌ Blank fields for identifiers, color or size on products that have them
- ❌ A price or stock status in the feed that differs from the product page
- ❌ Promotional text or watermarks on the main image
- ✅ Complete, accurate attributes on every variant
If products are already being rejected, see how to fix disapproved products in Google Merchant Center and why Meta catalog products get rejected. For title structure, see Google Shopping product titles.
Doing this at scale
FeedFix checks every product against Google Merchant Center and Meta Catalog rules and scores each one from 0 to 100 per channel. It drafts compliant title and description rewrites you review as before/after diffs, with bulk apply and an audit log of every change. See FeedFix.