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Inventory

Updated: Dec 1, 2025
Use this guide to learn about common uses and relative best practices for managing your product inventory.

Product Catalog

Update Product Details

If using scheduled product feed uploads via HTTPS or SFTP in Commerce Manager, be sure that the Facebook crawler is able to pull the latest version of your feed file with all latest changes (product description, prices, and so on).
Do not cache feed files on your server or CDN.

Enhance Product Descriptions

The value of the rich_text_description field from the product feed is visible on the Instagram PDP (falls back to description if rich_text_description is not provided). This is the only text field that is rendered on Instagram PDP.
In addition to your regular product description, you may want append additional details to rich_text_description, such as: item size, volume, origin, and so on, to provide customers with more useful information about the product.

Use One Catalog for Ads and Commerce

If you already have an ecommerce catalog for Advantage+ catalog ads, we recommend using the same catalog for both ads and commerce. A catalog can only be connected to one Shop. You can check your catalog eligibility for Shops About Catalog Eligibility for Facebook Shops, Business Help Center⁠.
Learn more about additional Best Practices for Using One Catalog, Business Help Center⁠.

Consider a Localized Catalog

For international inventory, we recommend using a localized catalog in addition to a U.S. catalog.
If you have a global handle and sell your products in multiple countries and languages, we offer a solution to localize relevant information. Learn how to create a localized catalog for shopping.
Your global audience can view product information in their own country or language (as you specify in your catalog setup). Language is determined by your audience’s phone or app language settings and their country is based on location. For languages and countries that have no override, the audience sees default country and language product information.
We recommend using the same catalog for all your activity across Instagram and Facebook whether it’s commerce or Advantage+ catalog ads.

Override for Onsite Checkout

When you’re using a localized catalog override for onsite checkout, you need to follow additional requirements:
  • The inventory field must be part of your main data feed and cannot be included in the override language or country data feeds.
  • Your main data feed must be in USD currency. Format the currency as a number, followed by the 3-digit ISO currency code (ISO 4217 standards)⁠, with a space between cost and currency. Use a period (“.”) as the decimal point; for example, 9.99 USD.
We recommend that you include only one (1) currency in your catalog so customers don’t see mixed currencies for products in your ads or commerce channels. To add product information and prices that will display for other countries or languages, upload a country feed or language feed to your catalog⁠ instead.

Remove an Override

When you want to remove an override from your catalog, set a new field (delete) to true for the override rows you want to remove.

Considerations

  • Filtering and sorting is done on the USD currency, so products might be unsorted in other localized currencies.
  • Typeahead currently doesn’t support localized product information (Search itself works as expected).
  • If you provide a localized product information for a given country and a particular product is missing override for this country, this product is hidden from the user in this country.
  • If you don’t provide any localized product information for a given country, all products display default localized information for that country’s audience.
Learn more about Localized Catalogs.

Inventory Updates

Use Automated Feed Updates

To create products manually in the UI, we recommend using automatic feeds instead of manual products. Feeds are more robust, less error-prone, easier to manage for larger catalogs, and a preferable way to keep your inventory in sync with your shop.
Advantages
You can easily manage a large inventory of products.
  • Multiple formats of feeds are supported (CSV, Google Sheets, XML), which makes it easy to perform bulk updates of multiple products, managing variants, and product media.
  • Feeds are designed to generate programmatically, making it an easy way to automate your inventory. Facebook retains the history of feed updates, which makes it easy to track changes in your inventory.
  • Using the feed allows you to validate your product data against the rules enforced by Facebook feed ingestion processes.
  • There are limitations on what fields you can edit by using manual product updates and feeds enable you to fully leverage all Facebook Commerce platform capabilities.

You can update your inventory automatically based on schedule.

  • Feeds can be updated as frequency as every hour by using a feed mechanism.

You can have multiple feeds updating different parts of catalogs independently on different schedules, if needed.

  • This simplifies management of your catalog in case you have products updated with different frequencies.
  • You can leverage your existing feeds solutions for other channels.
Disadvantages
  • For very small catalogs (up to 100 SKUs) not updated frequently, feeds create maintenance overhead.
  • There’s a delay between the feed update and product updates in the shop.
Learn more about how to Add Items to a Catalog, Business Help Center⁠.

Consider a Feed Update for Inventory Updates

With the option to replace your feed⁠, your new file completely overwrites the previous file. Alternatively, if you update your feed⁠, your new file updates the items in your previous file and adds any new items. No items are deleted unless you mark them for deletion.
If you have a large inventory, we strongly recommend that you update (instead of replacing) for faster feed processing.
If using scheduled product feed uploads via HTTPS or SFTP in Commerce Manager, be sure that the Facebook crawler is able to pull the latest version of your feed file with all latest changes (product description, prices, and so on). Do not cache feed files on your server or CDN.

Choose a Strategy for Sending Inventory Updates

The minimum scheduled feed updates frequency is hourly. If you require more frequent inventory updates (for faster-selling inventory):
  • Use the Catalog Batch API or Direct Feed Upload API on your own cron.
  • Implement a stock threshold and set the availability to “out of stock” if the product inventory is less than the threshold value.
If products are marked as “out of stock” on Instagram when they are actually “in stock” on your website, buyers may have negative experiences. When implementing inventory thresholds, make sure they are adequately small to prevent products going out of stock on Instagram. Overselling is possible, so make sure the threshold is not too small.

Manage Product Visibility

When uploading product feeds, you can choose fields specific to determine whether a product is visible, whether a person can buy the product through onsite checkout, and what channels the product can be visible. Learn more about Product Visibility Per Channel.

Using Onsite Checkout

Make Your Product Visible and Available to Purchase via Shops

  1. Set the availability field to in stock and the inventory count to greater than 0.
  2. If you include the visibility field, make sure it is published (not hidden).
  3. If you include the disabled_capabilities field, make sure SHOPS is enabled.

Make Your Product Visible in Your Shop (Not Available to Purchase)

  1. Set the inventory to 0 or availability to out of stock.
  2. If you include the visibility field, make sure it is published (not hidden).
  3. If you include the disabled_capabilities field, make sure SHOPS is enabled.

Hide Your Product from Your Shop

You can use the visibility field and set it to hidden, or use disabled_capabilities and block SHOPS visibility.
Advantage+ catalog ads do not use the inventory field.
  • If availability is set to out of stock, your product is not visible in an ad.
  • If visibility is set to hidden or staging, your product is not visible in an ad.
  • If the disabled_capabilities field includes DA, your product is not visible in an ad.
Learn more about supported catalog fields.

Handle Catalog Validations via Error Report

When you upload products to your catalog — manually (through a one time file upload) or automated feed upload — Commerce Manager provides a report with any potential errors and warnings. You can download the report or view it in Commerce Manager.

View Errors for Your Catalog

  1. Navigate to www.facebook.com/products and select your catalog.
  2. Open the Catalog tab and go to Issues.

View Errors for Individual Data Feed Upload

  1. Go to the Catalog tab > Data Sources.
  2. Select a data feed > expand any of the Upload Sessions to see or download a report.
Learn how to Troubleshoot Data Feed Errors⁠.

Populate Commerce-Relevant Fields

To support your catalog inventory, we provide required fields for Advantage+ catalog ads to product tagging to onsite checkout. For example, id, title, description, price, link, and so on. In addition, we provide additional required fields for commerce and Checkout. See our About catalogs in Commerce Manager⁠ Help Center article for more information about catalogs.
When using category-specific fields, you must provide a category identifier — a Google Product Category or a Facebook product category. If you provide one of these category fields, you can also use additional fields specific to that category to provide more detailed information about your items.

Recommendations

  • When uploading a catalog for commerce and Checkout specifically, we recommend to include availability, inventory, google_product_category, shipping, and shipping_weight along with the other required fields.
  • Include all relevant fields, even if they are marked “Optional”. This helps surface relevant products to people.
  • When controlling variants, group relevant products with the same item_group_id, and include size or color to differentiate variants.
  • If your products have a discounted price, include sale_price and sale_price_effective_date.
Learn more about commerce catalog fields.

Provide a Product Category

For a product catalog to be eligible for Checkout on Facebook or Instagram, you must provide at least one of these fields:
  • google_product_category
  • fb_product_category
Facebook needs the product category information on each catalog item to calculate taxes when customers check out directly on Facebook or Instagram.
See the full list of GPC⁠ and FPC⁠. For both, you can use the numerical ID or the textual taxonomy string.
Learn more about product categories for catalog items⁠.

Product Variants

Specify Product Variants

Product variants are variations of the same product in your catalog that differ by size, color, or pattern. A group of variants of the same product for a product group is designated by having the same item_group_id field.
Specify unique attributes of each variant using the following fields:
  • size
  • color
  • gender
  • pattern
  • material
You can also specify additional attributes using the additional_variant_attribute field (example value: Scent:Fruity,Packaging:Fancy). For a complete list of fields and formats, see the supported catalog fields.
The attributes you specify are used to show size and color pickers on product detail pages on Facebook and Instagram.

Provide Values for All Product Variants

Provide values for all product variants, including out of stock variants; otherwise, the Variants dropdown may not render on the Instagram PDP.
  • Use sale_price – Define whether or not tjhe sale price should be added to the feed. In addition to a sale price, you can specify a sale_price_effective_date.
  • Use final_sale status – Define whether or not the final sale information should be added to the feed.
Learn more about product variants for catalogs⁠ and supported fields for catalogs.

Use custom_label to Define Collections on Arbitrary Attributes

There are 5 optional custom label fields allowed in the catalog feed file, ranging from custom_label_0 to custom_label_4.
If you need to define a collection of products, and are not able to use other fields, such as size, color, price, and so on, then you can add any custom labels in these custom fields when uploading your feed file, and use them to define your collection.
Custom labels are also used in Advantage+ catalog ads, and you can configure your ad to display the custom label field in your ad. If you use your catalog for both commerce and Advantage+ catalog ads, make sure you use different custom labels if it contains information that you don’t want to show in ads.

Provide Rich Media in Descriptions

You can provide up to 5,000 characters of rich format text description for an item using HTML tags, in the rich_text_description field. If this field is provided, we use it instead of description; however, the description field is still required so that it can be used as a fallback if rich text cannot be rendered correctly.
Supported tags include <b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <br>, <p>, <ul>, and <li> . Includes all Header tags (<h1> through <h6>) .
Attributes within tags are not supported.
Learn more about Inventory, Commerce Platform.

Learn More

Catalog

Inventory

Product Categories

Product Variants

Troubleshooting

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