What Is a Product Feed?

A product feed is a structured file that lists all your products and their details — title, price, image, link, availability — that your store platform produces, Renable imports, and ad networks read to build your ads.

Updated July 16, 2026

A product feed is a structured file — usually XML or CSV — that lists every product you sell along with the details ads need: title, price, image, link, and whether it's in stock. Your store platform produces and updates it automatically; Renable imports it, and ad networks like Meta and Google read it to build your ads.

What's inside a product feed#

A product feed is really a table: one row per product, and a column for each detail about it. You don't read the file yourself — it's built to be read by machines — but it carries the same information a shopper would see on your product page, in a form ad networks can act on.

Most feeds carry, per product:

  • An identifier — a unique ID for the product, so it can be tracked and updated over time.
  • A title and description — the product's name and its written details.
  • A link — the page a shopper lands on when they click your ad.
  • An image — the main product photo.
  • A price — and often a sale price.
  • Availability — whether the product is in stock, so ads stop showing sold-out items.

Feeds usually also carry extra attributes — brand, product category, barcodes (GTIN), color, size, and more — which help ad networks match and target your products. Each ad network expects its own set of required and recommended fields, and a product missing a required one can be rejected. See Product missing from my feed or ads.

Where your product feed comes from#

Your product feed comes from your online store, not from Renable. You don't build it by hand — your e-commerce platform generates it and keeps it current as your catalog changes. Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and most other platforms can produce one, either built in or through a feed app.

The feed usually lives at a web address (a URL) that your store keeps updated. When a price changes or a product sells out, your platform refreshes the feed at that same URL — nothing for you to re-export. Some stores skip the feed URL and connect their catalog straight to Renable through Meta or Google instead — see Working with catalogs for those options. For where to find your feed on your specific platform, see Import your first product feed.

Why the product feed matters#

The product feed is the foundation everything else is built on. Because it's a live, always-current list rather than a one-time export, your ads can stay in sync with your store on their own — new products appear, price changes flow through, and sold-out items stop showing, without you touching each ad.

Get the feed right and everything downstream benefits; a feed with missing images, thin titles, or wrong prices produces weak ads no matter how good the creative is. That's why so much of Renable is about reading, cleaning, and shaping the feed before it reaches your ads.

How a product feed shows up in Renable#

In Renable, your product feed lives inside a catalog — one catalog is one product-feed source, usually one store. You connect the feed once by giving the catalog its URL (or by asking Aimée to find it for you), and Renable imports your products on a schedule from then on. See Working with catalogs.

Once your products are in, you're not stuck with the feed exactly as it arrived. Renable lets you fix and reshape it — clean up values, fill in gaps, drop products you can't advertise, and line your feed's columns up with the fields ad networks expect — all before it reaches a channel. See Transforming your feed.

From there, your feed flows down through the rest of the pipeline: enrichment, product sets, templates, and finally the channels that hand a finished feed to Meta, Google, or TikTok. For the full mental model, see How Renable works.

FAQ#

Is a product feed the same as my product catalog?

They're closely related but not identical. Your product feed is the file that lists your products; in Renable, a catalog is the feed source plus everything Renable does with it — the import schedule, locale, enrichment settings, and the rules that clean it up. One catalog wraps one product feed.

Do I need to create a product feed myself?

No. Your online store platform produces it for you and keeps it up to date. Your job is just to connect it — see Import your first product feed, or let Aimée find and set it up from just your store's web address.

What file format is a product feed?

Usually XML or CSV (a plain spreadsheet-style file), and sometimes TSV. Renable reads the common e-commerce feed formats, so you don't need to convert anything — you point Renable at your feed and it figures out the format.

Related articles#