Product Catalog Best Practices

An accurate, up-to-date, and visible product catalog helps your brand maximize sales, build strong partnerships, and avoid costly errors like duplicates or outdated data that could lead to lost opportunities. To support this, your goal should be to create and maintain an excellent product catalog. This article covers the key do’s and don’ts to keep your catalog accurate, current, and visible to partners, helping you prevent mistakes that could impact your business.

Product catalog do's

Below is a list of best practices you should follow to create high-quality product catalogs, with guidance tailored to key fields and functional areas. These recommendations will help ensure your catalog data is accurate, complete, and optimized for visibility and performance on Marketplace surfaces like the Product Marketplace and Mobile App.

Complete all critical fields accurately

To have your products appear in areas where partners can see and interact with them, your catalog must include accurate and complete data in the required fields. See Product Catalog Field Requirements for the full list of fields. Any products missing these fields may be excluded from Marketplace surfaces like the Product Marketplace and Mobile App.

Handle variants and avoid duplicates

• List each product variant (size, color, etc.) as a separate line with its own unique ID, image, and price.
• Use Parent SKU (indicating which parent product a variant belongs to) and Is Parent (marking whether an item is the parent itself) to link related product variants together.
• Review health reports regularly to identify and fix duplicate entries, as only the first instance will be displayed.

Maintain manufacturer and brand data quality

• Use consistent naming conventions (e.g., always “Nike,” never “Nike Inc.”).
• Complete manufacturer fields to enhance search accuracy and data deduplication.

Keep catalogs updated regularly

• Update your catalog daily to reflect current products, offers, prices, stock, etc. For exceptionally large catalogs, provide a full catalog weekly instead, or regular supplementary updates via API as needed.
• Catalogs that go without updates for an extended period of time may be closed to preserve the quality and accuracy of the Marketplace experience.

Fix errors and monitor catalog health

• Address all reported errors, warnings, and duplicate entries promptly to ensure your catalogs remain accurate and fully functional. Learn more about troubleshooting product catalogs.

Map custom fields properly

• For custom catalogs, ensure all fields map correctly to the standard catalog format to avoid missing product info for partners.

Add fields for Retail Media Seller programs

When working with sellers through Retailer Seller partnerships, your catalog needs to contain additional fields so products can be correctly mapped to sellers.

• Include the Seller ID, Seller Name, and Retail Strategy fields.
• If multiple sellers offer the same product, include a row for each seller's offer, not only one row for the winning offer (i.e., include all buy box contenders, not just the buy box winner).
• See Product Catalog Field Requirements to learn more about the mandatory fields and additional catalog requirements for Seller.

Product catalog don'ts

Below is a list of common mistakes to avoid when creating product catalogs, highlighting key fields and functional areas where errors frequently occur. Ignoring these guidelines can lead to inaccurate, incomplete, and poorly optimized catalog data, negatively impacting visibility and performance on the Product Marketplace.

Don’t leave critical fields blank or use placeholders

• Missing or placeholder values block product visibility and reduce partner engagement.

Don’t let catalogs remain in an error state

• Catalogs with unresolved errors for over 30 days may be closed but can be reopened after fixes.

Don’t ignore outdated catalogs

• Catalogs that go without updates for an extended period of time may be closed to preserve the quality and accuracy of the Marketplace experience.

Don’t allow duplicate entries to persist

• Duplicates clutter the Marketplace and reduce visibility; only the first duplicate is shown.

Don’t skip mapping for custom fields

• Unmapped custom fields limit product data visibility for your partners.

Don’t leave optional but valuable fields empty

• Fields like product description and category help partners find your products and improve the overall experience.

Additional resources

Below are additional resources to help you with specific aspects of managing your product catalog. Each article complements different parts of this best practices guide to resolve issues, optimize your catalog, and maintain data quality.

• File Formats for Product Catalogs — Understand acceptable file formats and prepare your catalog files correctly. Use this before you submit a catalog.
• Add Product Catalogs as a Brand — Follow step-by-step instructions to submit a catalog under your brand account. Use this to get started correctly.
• Troubleshoot Product Catalog Errors & Warnings — Diagnose and fix common errors, warnings, and duplicates. Use this to keep your catalog healthy and visible.
• Manage & View Uploaded Product Catalogs — Update, maintain, and organize your catalogs after upload. Use this to keep your data current.
• Create & Manage Product Catalog Rules — Customize catalog rules to handle variants, avoid duplicates, and optimize data display.