How to connect a Shopify catalog to Meta (with designed ad images)

A Meta catalog is the list of products your catalog ads draw from. Shopify can send products to it through the Facebook & Instagram sales channel, but the images it sends are your plain product photos.

If you want catalog ads that show a designed image (your brand, the price, a sale badge), the cleanest way is a scheduled data feed: a link Meta fetches on a schedule, which carries your products and the image to show for each one.

Here is how to set that up with Richicat in four steps.

1. Bring your products in

Connect the read-only Richicat Shopify app, or export your products from Shopify (Products → Export → CSV) and upload the file. You will see every product Richicat found, with its variants, photos and price, before anything is added.

With the app connected, choose how often to sync: instantly, every hour, or once a day.

2. Pick a template and make it yours

Create a feed and choose a template. Every template previews with your own products, so you can judge it with your catalog in view. Then change the words, colours and fonts once in the editor. Every product's ad follows.

3. Create the catalog feed

Richicat renders every product in square, portrait and story sizes and gives you a feed link. The feed is standard Meta catalog XML with each product's ID, title, description, link, price, sale price, availability, brand and item group.

4. Add the feed in Commerce Manager

1. Open Commerce Manager and choose your catalog, or create one for e-commerce.
2. Go to Catalog → Data sources → Add items → Data feed.
3. Choose Use a URL and paste the Richicat feed link.
4. Set a schedule. Hourly or daily works for most stores.
5. Pick the currency your prices are in and save.

Meta fetches the feed right away and then on your schedule. Products appear in the catalog with the Richicat ads as their images.

5. Point your catalog ads at it

In Ads Manager, create a Sales campaign with an Advantage+ catalog ad (or a manual catalog ad) and pick this catalog. If you run more than one Richicat feed, each one sets a custom label with the feed's name, which you can use to build product sets.

Keeping it fresh

Prices and stock come from your Shopify sync, so the feed always has the current numbers. When you change the design, or a price change should appear on the image itself, update the feed in Richicat.