To advertise your products, Renable first needs your store's product feed — a continuously updated list of everything you sell, with titles, prices, images, and availability. You connect it once by creating a catalog and giving it your feed's URL, or by asking Aimée to find and set it up for you. From there Renable imports your products and takes over.
What a product feed is#
A product feed is a live, machine-readable list of your products that your store platform keeps up to date — the same kind of feed Google Shopping and Meta ads run on. Each product carries the details ads need: name, price, image, link, and whether it's in stock.
You don't build this feed by hand. Your e-commerce platform produces it, and Renable reads it. That's what makes your ads stay current: when a price changes or a product sells out, your feed updates, and Renable follows along on its next check.
In Renable, the feed lives inside a catalog — one catalog is one product feed source, usually one store. Connecting your first feed is really just creating your first catalog and pointing it at your feed.
Where your product feed comes from#
Your feed comes from your online store, not from Renable. Most platforms can produce one, and the exact steps differ by platform:
- Shopify — see Getting a product feed from Shopify.
- WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, Squarespace, or Wix — each has its own short guide.
- Already advertising on Google? You may already have a feed set up in Google Merchant Center — see Finding your feed in the Google Merchant Center.
If you're not sure where your feed is, don't go hunting — Aimée can often find it for you from just your store's web address — see Let Aimée set up your feed.
Connect your feed in three steps#
Once you have your feed's URL, connecting it takes about a minute.
- From your dashboard, add a catalog and choose to connect a product feed.
- Paste your feed's URL into the product feed field. Renable checks the URL and shows you a live preview of the products it found — so you can confirm it read your feed correctly before saving. If the URL is wrong or the format isn't one Renable recognizes, you'll see that here instead of a broken import later.
- Save. Renable starts importing your products right away.
You can also connect directly to Google Merchant Center or a Meta Product Catalog instead of pasting a URL. Those live connections and every catalog setting are covered in Working with catalogs.
What happens after you connect#
Connecting the feed is the last manual step. From there Renable does the work:
- Your products import. Renable pulls in everything in your feed. This usually takes only a few minutes for a typical store, and a little longer for very large catalogs. You'll see your product count fill in as it goes.
- Renable prepares them for ads. As products land, Renable cleans up images and writes ad copy automatically, so your products are ready to advertise without you touching each one. For how this all fits together, see How Renable works.
- It stays in sync. Renable re-checks your feed on a schedule, so new products, price changes, and sold-out items flow through on their own. You don't re-import by hand.
You don't have to babysit the import — Aimée can wait for it to finish and tell you how many products came in, and flag anything that didn't import cleanly.
Or let Aimée set it up#
You don't have to find your feed or fill in a single field yourself. Give Aimée your store's web address and ask her to set up your products, and she can figure out your store platform, locate the right feed, confirm it actually serves products, and connect it to a catalog — then hand it to you to approve before anything goes live. See Let Aimée set up your feed.
This is the easiest way to start if feeds and URLs aren't your thing — describe what you want in plain language and let Aimée do the setup.
FAQ#
I don't have a feed URL — where do I get one?
Your online store produces it, not Renable. Use the platform guide for your store (Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, Squarespace, or Wix) to find or generate your feed, or just give Aimée your store's web address and ask her to find it.
How long does the import take?
Usually just a few minutes for a typical store, and longer for very large catalogs with tens of thousands of products. It scales automatically — there's nothing to configure. Your product count fills in as the import runs.
Do I have to re-import every time my products change?
No. Renable re-checks your feed automatically every hour, so price changes, new products, and out-of-stock items are picked up on their own. Connecting the feed is a one-time step. If your shop regenerates its feed at a known time, you can pin the hourly import to a specific minute with the Import time setting in the Product feed source dialog — see Keep your feed fresh.
My feed data looks messy — do I need to fix it before importing?
No. Import first, then shape it if you need to. Once your products are in, you can clean up values, drop products you can't advertise, and line your feed up with what ad networks expect — see Transforming your feed. For a first import, you don't need any of that.
The preview shows odd symbols instead of accented characters — what's wrong?
Renable detects your feed's character set automatically, so this is rare. When a feed is served in an older encoding that Renable can't detect, you can set an Encoding override on the product feed source — leave it on Auto-detect unless the preview looks garbled, then pick the character set your feed uses. See My feed import failed under "The import worked, but characters look garbled".
Related articles#
- Let Aimée set up your feed — the hands-off way to connect your products.
- Getting a product feed from Shopify — and sibling guides for other platforms.
- Working with catalogs — feed sources, locale, and enrichment settings.
- Transforming your feed — clean and shape your feed once it's imported.
- How Renable works — the mental model behind catalogs, products, and ads.