A catalog is how you get products into Renable. Typically you'd set up one catalog per store or market — for example, one for your main website and another for a regional storefront.
A catalog belongs to exactly one project, decided when you create it, and that assignment is permanent — there's no way to move a catalog to a different project later. If you need the same products available in another project, you create a separate catalog and import the feed again; the two won't share import history or enrichment state. See Managing catalogs in a project for how catalogs are added to and removed from a project.
Each catalog controls:
- Where its products come from (a product feed)
- How that feed is shaped and cleaned before it reaches your ads — mapping, rules, and joined data
- Optional reviews and top-seller statistics
- Which AI enrichment features run on its products
- Its locale
- AI prompts that apply to all of this catalog's products, in any project
Importing products#
Every catalog imports its products from one of three sources, chosen as the Product feed type:
- A custom feed URL — point Renable at a feed file (Google Merchant XML/CSV/TSV, Shopify Atom/XML, or another supported format) hosted by your e-commerce platform or a feed-management tool. This is the default for new catalogs.
- Meta Product Catalog — connect live via OAuth to a Facebook business and product catalog. See Importing a Meta catalog.
- Google Merchant Center Product Catalog — connect live via OAuth to your Merchant Center account. See Connecting Google Merchant Center. If you'd rather use a public feed URL instead of an API connection, see Finding your feed in the Google Merchant Center.
Whichever you choose, editing the product feed shows a live preview of the parsed products (or errors) before you save, so you can catch a broken URL or unexpected format immediately. A manual Reload button forces an immediate re-import, bypassing normal caching — useful right after fixing a feed issue when you don't want to wait for the next scheduled check.
Feeds are checked for changes every hour. By default Renable picks the time within the hour automatically; the Import time setting in the Product feed source dialog lets you pin it to a specific minute past the hour (in 5-minute steps) — useful when your shop regenerates its feed at a known time, so each import picks up the freshest file. See Questions about catalogs for what happens when a feed briefly fails, and how product limits affect what gets imported.
Shaping and fixing your feed#
Importing is only the first half of a catalog's job. Once your products are in, the catalog workspace is where you fix and shape that feed before it reaches your ads — rename columns, clean up bad values, drop products you can't advertise, join in extra data, and line everything up with the fields ad networks expect. Every change stays in a draft, and nothing reprocesses or reaches a channel until you Publish. See Transforming your feed for how the workspace and its draft-and-publish model fit together.
The work splits across a handful of tools:
- Mapping your feed fields — line your feed's columns up with the catalog fields channels expect, so your title column feeds the Title field, your price column feeds Price, and so on.
- Fixing your feed data with rules — conditions plus actions that clean and reshape values: set or remove a field, exclude a product, or split it into variants.
- Joining another feed — pull in a second feed for stock levels, supplier data, or extra fields, matched to your products with a lookup.
- Mapping tables — convert many source values to correct ones in bulk, such as mapping your own category names onto the categories an ad network expects.
- Working with rulesets — when several catalogs need the same cleanup, keep those rules in one place and apply them everywhere.
- Splitting variants into products — turn one feed row into separate products, one per size, color, or other variant.
- Feed runs and warnings — see what each import did, read any warnings, and trace how a single product's values were produced, step by step.
You don't have to work through these by hand. Describe what you want to Aimée in plain language — "exclude everything that's out of stock," "map my category column to Google's categories," or "join this stock feed" — and she can set the feed source, edit the rules and mapping, join another feed, and publish once you approve.
A note on barcodes#
GTIN/EAN/UPC values from your feed are only used for two things: filtering product sets and matching incoming customer reviews to the right product. They don't merge or unify products across catalogs — matching for content purposes is by SKU, scoped to a single project. See How Renable works for how products from different catalogs in a project are deduplicated in the UI.
Review feed (optional)#
A catalog can also import customer reviews, which Aimée uses to pull quotable fragments and ratings into ad copy. See Connecting a review feed for supported sources and setup.
GA4 top-seller ranking (optional)#
You can connect a Google Analytics 4 property (Connect to GA4, a separate button from the product-feed connection) so Renable knows which of your products actually sell best. This doesn't import any products — it only supplies ranking data, used to prioritize which products get processed first when you're near your plan's limits, and to help you build "best sellers" product sets.
Don't confuse this with Connecting Google Merchant Center — that's a completely separate Google connection that does import products.
AI enrichment features#
The catalog's Features section controls which AI processing runs on this catalog's products:
- Automatically create product images with transparent background — turns on the background-removal pipeline (see below).
- Automatically categorize images as product, lifestyle, staged, .. — classifies each image's content type.
- Automatically extract ad copy from product descriptions — pulls a short fragment straight out of existing product descriptions, useful when your descriptions are already well-written. (AI-written ad copy is configured with prompts on the project's Creative tab instead.)
- Automatically predict Google product categories when they are missing in the feed — fills in
google_product_categorywhen your feed doesn't supply it. - Use reviews from all products with the same Group ID — pools reviews across variants (color, size, etc.) instead of only using reviews written on the exact SKU.
Content types#
Several places in Renable — including the background-remover pipeline below — let you scope something to specific content types. The full list: Information, Product, Lifestyle, Staged, Feature, Review, Award, Ad copy, Headline, Reason to buy, Voice script, Product name.
For image work specifically, the categories you'll use most are:
- Product — the product on its own, usually against a neutral or white background.
- Lifestyle — the product shown in a natural, real-world setting.
- Staged — the product shown in a studio setting, on a model, or otherwise professionally staged.
- Feature — a close-up of a specific product detail.
- Information — badges, certifications, infographics, and other informational graphics.
- Award — an expert-review badge or award seal, e.g. a "Best in test" logo.
- Review — images sourced from a customer review.
The remaining categories (Ad copy, Headline, Reason to buy, Voice script, Product name) tag written content rather than images, and mainly come up when reviewing or scoping AI-generated copy — see Reviewing and approving content.
The background-remover pipeline#
Turning on transparent backgrounds doesn't just pick a single AI model — it lets you build an ordered pipeline of steps, each with its own settings. For every image, Renable tries the first step; if the result doesn't meet that step's quality bar, it falls through to the next step in the list.
Each step has:
- Background remover — which model to use: Make transparent (v1), (v2), (v3), or No transparency (skip removal for this step — still crops, but doesn't remove the background).
- Use for content types — which categories this step applies to (see above).
- Only apply this step to the main image (image_link) — restrict the step to just the feed's designated main image rather than the whole gallery.
- Automatically crop away image backgrounds as much as possible — trims empty space around the product after background removal.
- Acceptable background removal quality score (otherwise fallback to next step) — a minimum quality threshold; if a step's result scores below it, Renable moves on to the next step instead of keeping a bad result.
See Image background removal and classification for how the v1/v2/v3 models differ, why a typical pipeline chains a cheaper model first, and how to review or override the result on a specific product.
Locale#
Each catalog has a primary locale and fallback languages, which drive the language Aimée writes ad copy in. See Languages and localization for details, including how number and currency formatting work.
Prompts#
A table of AI prompts scoped to this catalog — these run on all of this catalog's products, regardless of which project is processing them. See Working with prompts for how to create and configure prompts.
Notes and events#
At the bottom of the catalog page, the Notes and events section logs feed import activity — successes, failures, parse errors, quota warnings — along with any notes you or your team add manually. Check here first if a catalog isn't behaving as expected.
Advanced settings#
An Advanced settings area holds a custom User-Agent header, for websites or CDNs that block automated scraping. See Questions about catalogs for when and how to use it.
Cost and limits#
AI enrichment features consume computing power, which is Renable's cost for running the service — some features, especially prompt-based copy generation, video generation, and the v2 background remover, cost noticeably more than others. Catalog count and product-per-catalog limits are also capped by your subscription plan. See Plans and limits and Understanding credits for details.