If a catalog's import failed or no products came in, open its Activity tab and read the run's status and warnings — they name the cause. It's almost always the feed's web address (wrong, expired, or private), the source blocking automated fetching, or a truncated feed. Fix the cause and import again — or ask Aimée to fix it for you.
Start on the Activity tab: read the run#
A failed import is never silent — Renable records what went wrong. Open the catalog and go to its Activity tab, then look at the most recent import:
- Its Status tells you how it finished.
- Expanding the run reveals the log — the stage-by-stage record of where it broke.
- Below the imports, the warnings describe the problem in plain terms and drill down to the exact products affected, so a message becomes a working list.
The health strip at the top of the catalog page shows the same status at a glance — a warning light with "Needs attention — N warnings" when something's wrong. For a full tour of the run detail, the statistics chips, and how to trace a single value, see Feed runs, warnings, and tracing a value.
Once you know what the run is complaining about, it's almost always one of the three causes below.
Cause 1: the feed's web address is wrong, expired, or private#
The most common reason nothing imports is that Renable can't reach your product feed at the address it's pointed at. That happens when:
- The address has a typo, or was pasted incomplete.
- The feed has moved or expired — some platforms and feed tools regenerate the feed at a new URL, or issue links that stop working after a while.
- The feed is private — it sits behind a login or needs an access token, so an anonymous request gets rejected.
Renable names which of these it hit, in plain language:
- If the address returns a normal web page instead of a feed file — often a sign-in page, or a link to a product listing page rather than the feed itself — the catalog's activity flags "That address returned a web page, not a product feed." That almost always means the feed needs a sign-in, or the address isn't a direct link to the feed file. Get the direct feed link from your store platform or feed tool.
- If the feed is password-protected, the notice tells you whether credentials are the problem: "This feed needs a username and password" when none are saved for it, or that the saved username and password were rejected when they are. Adding or fixing them is covered in Connecting a password-protected feed.
A quick test: paste the exact feed address into a private (incognito) browser window. If it doesn't return the feed there, Renable can't read it either.
A closer test is the download button on the feed's card on the Data sources tab. It fetches the feed the way an import does — same address, same custom User-Agent, same stored username and password — and saves the response as a file, so you can see exactly what your provider sends Renable. That settles whether the problem is the address, the sign-in, or the contents of the feed itself. It uses the address currently in your feed settings, including an edit you haven't published yet, so you can check a corrected address before you publish it. Auxiliary feeds have the same button.
To fix the address:
- Open the catalog and edit its product feed source. Editing shows a live preview of the parsed products — or the error — before you save, so you can confirm the new address actually serves products.
- Paste in the corrected address. For a private feed, use the full URL that includes its access token — the same one that works in a private browser window. If your store platform offers an official connection instead (for example a Meta or Google Merchant Center account link), that handles the sign-in for you — see Working with catalogs.
- Publish the catalog so the new address takes effect, then import (see Import again below). Nothing reprocesses until you publish.
Cause 2: the source is blocking automated fetching#
If the address is correct but the fetch still fails, your website, server, or CDN may be blocking automated requests — treating Renable's fetch as an unwanted bot and refusing it. The fix is to set a custom User-Agent for the catalog and have whoever manages your site whitelist it, so Renable is allowed through.
This is the same block that stops product images downloading, and the exact setting and recommended value are covered in Questions about catalogs under "Why can't my images be retrieved?" — follow those steps for the feed fetch too.
Cause 3: the feed came through truncated or malformed#
Sometimes the feed is reachable but the response is cut off or broken — your server times out mid-response, or a proxy truncates the feed. Renable treats this as a broken fetch rather than a real feed update: it does not delete your existing products, and it raises a visible error on the catalog instead. When your source returns a complete, valid response on the next scheduled fetch, everything picks back up on its own.
So if products briefly vanished and then returned, or the catalog shows an import error right after your site had a hiccup, check whether the source had a temporary outage before assuming anything was deleted. This behaviour is explained in full in Questions about catalogs under "Why did my catalog's products disappear and then come back on their own?"
The run says the import stopped with an unexpected error#
If the event on your dashboard says the import stopped with an unexpected error, or that some product updates could not be saved, the problem is usually on Renable's side rather than in your feed — an internal fault interrupted the import mid-way. Unlike the causes above, there is usually nothing to fix in your feed or its address:
- Your ads keep running on the products that were already imported.
- Renable retries automatically, and the notification clears on its own once an import completes.
If the same notification stays on your dashboard across several imports, contact support and include the notification's text — a persistent fault needs our attention. For a catalog connected through a Meta or Google account link, it's also worth checking that the connection is still authorized, since a revoked or expired account connection can surface this way.
The import worked, but characters look garbled#
Sometimes products come in fine but the text looks wrong — accented letters, currency symbols, or non-English characters show up as odd symbols or question marks (for example é where you expected é). That's an encoding mismatch: the feed is served in a character set Renable didn't detect correctly, so the bytes get decoded the wrong way.
Renable auto-detects the character set of almost every feed, so you rarely need to touch this. When a feed is served in an older single-byte encoding without declaring it, the automatic guess can be off — and that's what the Encoding override on the product feed source is for:
- Open the catalog and edit its product feed source.
- Find the Encoding setting. It's on Auto-detect by default — leave it there unless the live preview shows garbled characters.
- Switch it to the character set your feed actually uses (common ones are ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) and Windows-1252 for Western-European feeds, or UTF-8). Watch the preview: the characters should read correctly once the encoding matches.
- Publish the catalog so the fix takes effect, then import again.
If you're not sure which character set to pick, try the common Western-European ones and let the preview tell you which one reads correctly — or ask Aimée to set the encoding for you.
Import again after you fix it#
Once you've corrected the cause, trigger a fresh import from the "Import now" button in the health strip.
One thing trips people up here: "Import now" uses your last published configuration, not your draft. If you just changed the feed address (or any other catalog setting), that edit lives in a draft until you publish it. So when you click "Import now" with unpublished changes, Renable warns you and offers three choices — choose Publish & import to publish your fix first and then import with it applied. The full dialog is covered in Fixing your feed data with rules.
After the import runs, check the Activity tab again: a healthy run reports its new and updated products, and any remaining warnings point you at whatever still needs attention.
Or ask Aimée#
You don't have to diagnose this by hand. Aimée can check and fix your feed's web address — she validates that a candidate address actually serves products before saving it, so she won't point your catalog at a dead link. Give her the correct address, or just your store's web address, and she can find the feed, set it, and publish once you approve.
She can also wait for the import to finish and report back the real counts and warnings when it's done, and investigate a specific warning to tell you what caused it and what to do next. To have her find and set up the feed from scratch, see Let Aimée set up your feed.
FAQ#
The import finished but zero products came in — is that the same problem?
Usually, yes. A completed run with no products almost always means Renable reached an address that returned nothing usable — an empty, expired, or wrong feed. Open the run on the Activity tab: its warnings will say whether the feed was unreachable, empty, or unreadable.
I fixed the feed address but the import still uses the old one — why?
Imports process your last published configuration, not your draft. Editing the feed address saves a draft; publish it (or choose Publish & import) so the corrected address is the one that runs. See Fixing your feed data with rules.
My products disappeared after a failed import — are they gone for good?
No. When a fetch comes through truncated or broken, Renable keeps your existing products and raises an error rather than deleting anything. They come back automatically once your source returns a valid feed. See Questions about catalogs.
How do I know the fix worked?
Import again and watch the next run on the Activity tab — or ask Aimée to wait for it and report the counts. A clean run with new and updated products, and no repeat of the earlier warning, means the feed is flowing again.
My product titles show odd symbols instead of accented characters — how do I fix that?
That's a character-set (encoding) mismatch, not a failed import. Edit the catalog's product feed source and change the Encoding override from Auto-detect to the character set your feed uses — ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) and Windows-1252 are the usual culprits for Western-European feeds. The live preview shows when the characters read correctly. See "The import worked, but characters look garbled" above.