A Pinterest catalog is how you give Pinterest your product data — prices, stock, images, links — and it's what Pinterest's Shopping ads are built from. What Pinterest then does with that data is Pinterest's decision.
The Pinterest feed channel type builds that catalog: a channel whose columns follow Pinterest's catalog specification.
What setup does — and doesn't — get you#
Pinterest is unusual in that almost everything it requires happens before the catalog, on your side — so it's worth reading this section before the setup steps:
- Creating this channel prepares a catalog. It does not start any ads. Campaigns are built in Pinterest Ads Manager. A published Renable channel means Pinterest has good product data to read; what it shows is Pinterest's decision.
- Four things have to be true before Pinterest will accept a catalog at all: a Pinterest business account, your website claimed, the Pinterest tag installed on it, and a site that meets Pinterest's merchant guidelines — which in practice means findable contact details, a shipping policy, and a refund policy. None of these are in Renable. If a catalog won't attach, this list is where to look first.
- The Verified Merchant Program is optional and is not a setup step. It's easy to find and easy to mistake for a gate, but you do not need it to run a catalog or Shopping ads. Its bar is much higher — a business account at least three months old, a website claimed for at least nine months, a catalog ingesting successfully, and recent conversion events — and it isn't available everywhere. Treat it as something to grow into, not something blocking you today.
- Pinterest reads your feed once every 24 hours. You can choose what time of day it runs, but there's no faster schedule and no "fetch it now" button. A price change you publish here reaches Pinterest on its next daily run. (If you've read that Pinterest can refresh every six hours, that figure comes from third-party guides, not from Pinterest — plan around the daily cycle.)
- Performance+ is Pinterest's AI campaign product, and Pinterest's own wording is that its creative can automatically build Shopping and Collections ads from your catalog. That's Pinterest describing what Performance+ does with a catalog — it isn't a claim that a Renable catalog is required for it, or a prediction about results.
Creating the channel#
From a project's Channels section, create a channel and pick the Pinterest feed type. It seeds:
- Pinterest's catalog columns —
id,title,description,link,image_link,availability,price,sale_price,brand,condition, the identifiers (gtin,mpn),item_group_id,google_product_category,product_type, and the fivecustom_labelcolumns for campaign segmentation — bound to your product data. Pinterest uses the same attribute names as Google, so if you already have a Google Shopping channel, this one will look familiar. - Two starter rules — availability drops to
out of stockwhen a product's stock hits zero or its content is incomplete, and sale price fills only when a product is actually discounted. The availability values are written Pinterest's way —in stockandout of stock, with spaces, not the underscores Google uses. - Output left at XML. Pinterest reads RSS 2.0 and ATOM XML, CSV, and TSV, so nothing needs changing.
On the Settings tab, the Used for card shows the channel declared for Pinterest with its always-on Shopping ads use — that's what drives the field checks — plus two add-ons:
- Product video — adds a
video_linkcolumn carrying each product's video (.mp4,.mov, or.m4v). Pinterest documents this as a catalog attribute, and we haven't found a Pinterest page describing an ad format built from a catalog video — so the honest description is that the column enriches your catalog and Pinterest decides what it does with it. That's the same wording Renable uses for Google's video chip. - Extra product images — additional images per product beside the main one. Pinterest reads up to ten, and unlike the main image these extras only need to be 75 × 75 pixels. Turning the chip on adds an
additional_image_linkcolumn (one click from the ghost row on the Fields tab) and starts asking for at least two images per product.
Pinterest also supports supplementary feeds, so the Used as choice is available on its row: set it to Supplementary feed for an ID-matched side feed that updates a few fields on a catalog you already send. On a supplementary feed only the product ID is required.
Delivering the feed#
Pinterest fetches your feed URL — add the channel's feed URL as a data source on your Pinterest catalog, and pick the time of day the daily run should start. See Connecting a channel to Meta, Google, or TikTok for where to find the URL. [VERIFY: the exact path to the data-source screen in Pinterest's current business hub.]
Two delivery details worth knowing:
- Pinterest requires UTF-8, which is what Renable writes — nothing to configure.
- If you turn on the Compress feed file (.gz) switch, Pinterest reads it. Pinterest accepts several compressed formats but rejects encrypted or password-protected archives, which Renable never produces.
Checking the output#
- Your product images are the thing most likely to fail here. Pinterest wants at least 1000 × 1500 pixels — far more than any other destination Renable supports, and many times Google's minimum by area. Renable can't measure a remote image while writing the feed, so this won't show up as a warning on the Fields tab; check it against your own product photos before you go looking for other explanations. Extra images from the Extra product images add-on have a much smaller floor (75 × 75).
- Preview tab → Source view shows the exact file content per product.
- The Fields tab marks Pinterest's required fields and their fill rates from the latest render. Most of Pinterest's limits are looser than Google's and are checked here — product IDs up to 127 characters, titles up to 500, descriptions up to 10,000 — with one exception that runs the other way:
linkis capped at 511 characters, shorter than every other destination, so a long product URL carrying tracking parameters can run over. - Availability values are written with spaces (
in stock,out of stock,preorder), and Pinterest has nobackordervalue. The Pinterest channel type already writes them Pinterest's way; if you map availability yourself from your own catalog, send the spaced spellings. - Render results and warnings show on the Activity tab — see Channel events and troubleshooting.