Catalog Feed
The file or API that pushes your SKUs and attributes into ad platforms.
Catalog Feed is a creative & production concept that ecommerce teams touch every week, usually without agreeing on a definition first. This page sets out what it means, how to apply it at catalog scale, what to measure, and where it breaks.
Definition
A catalog feed (or product feed) is the structured file — usually XML, CSV, or Shopify/Woo direct — that ad platforms read to build the product catalog on their side.
Why it matters
Everything downstream — Shopping, DPA, catalog creative — inherits feed quality. Sparse or wrong feeds silently ruin performance.
Catalog Feed in practice
A catalog feed (or product feed) is the structured file — usually XML, CSV, or Shopify/Woo direct — that ad platforms read to build the product catalog on their side. Production concepts decide whether creative can be made at catalog scale or only for hero moments. Anything that requires a person to open a canvas per SKU stops working around the fortieth product. The brands that ship the most variants treat production as a system of templates, rules and specs rather than a series of one-off files. Read it next to Product Feed, Product Catalog, Product Attributes.
How to get it right
Define it once, then apply it everywhere. Lock type ramp, palette, logo placement, offer treatment and legal lines in a shared brand system, and build templates that accept the product feed as input. Every export should already respect the placement's safe zones so nothing needs a manual crop after the fact.
What to measure and watch
Quality control is checkable, not subjective: does the asset meet the platform's ratio and file requirements, does key content sit inside the safe area, is text legible at thumbnail size, and does the product read in the first frame? Run that checklist before spend, because rejections and silent crops cost more than the render did. Why this matters commercially: Everything downstream — Shopping, DPA, catalog creative — inherits feed quality. Sparse or wrong feeds silently ruin performance.
Where Catalog Feed sits in an agentic creative workflow
In Xeli this is a rule an agent enforces, not a note in a brief. Templates read the catalog, respect the brand system, and output every required ratio for every SKU at ad-ready resolution — so a 400-product drop becomes a queue to approve rather than a month of files. In the context of creative & production, that means the concept stops being something a person re-applies by hand every campaign and becomes a rule the system enforces on every asset it produces.