Fix Meta Commerce Manager feed issues

Meta's catalog policy bans promotional text overlay on product images. When the auto-reviewer flags this, affected SKUs stop serving in Dynamic Product Ads, Advantage+ Catalog Ads, and organic Shopping placements until the image is replaced.

Affects: image_link

The item falls under Meta's restricted-product categories — alcohol, supplements, beauty claims, weapons, cryptocurrency, gambling, health products, and others. Items in these categories face stricter rules and often country-specific restrictions.

Meta's general-purpose rejection — the item violates some policy but the auto-reviewer hasn't specified which. Frustrating because the diagnostic is vague. Usually it's image policy, restricted content, or personal attributes, but the path to the right answer involves digging.

Not a formal Commerce Manager rejection — the catalog is healthy and items deliver. But pixel events report content_ids that don't match the id field in your feed, so Meta's algorithm can't link user behaviour to specific products. Performance suffers silently.

Affects: id

Meta requires brand on every catalog item. Items without brand are rejected from the catalog and don't serve in Dynamic Product Ads or Advantage+ Catalog Ads.

Affects: brand

The price field's currency code isn't recognised. Meta expects ISO 4217 three-letter codes (USD, GBP, EUR, JPY). Affected items are rejected from the catalog.

Affects: price

Not a hard rejection — items still serve. But Meta's algorithm continues showing items marked 'in stock' when the actual inventory has hit zero. Budget is wasted on impressions for products users can't buy.

Affects: availability

The image at image_link is below Meta's 500×500 minimum. In 2026 Meta has tightened practical enforcement, so images that previously squeaked through at 400×400 now consistently fail.

Affects: image_link

Meta's policy strictly limits weight-loss claims and imagery. Products positioned as weight-loss aids, before/after transformations, or 'fast results' get rejected even when the product is genuinely effective.

Meta bans before-and-after imagery that implies body transformation, weight loss, or cosmetic results. Common rejection cause for beauty, fitness, supplements, and cosmetic-procedure verticals.

Affects: image_link

Meta can't fetch the image at image_link. Could be 404, geo-blocked, requires authentication, or HTTPS issues. Items with broken images don't serve.

Affects: image_link

The entire catalog has been rejected — not individual items, the whole thing. This is rare but catastrophic. Usually triggered by a pattern of policy violations across many items or an account-level restriction.

Items without an availability value can't enter Meta's catalog. Affects items where the feed-generation pipeline failed to map the availability field correctly.

Affects: availability

The product is restricted from the region your audience is targeting. Often a regulatory issue (alcohol shipping limits, supplement claims that vary by country) rather than a product issue.

Meta accepts titles up to 200 characters but truncates to ~65 in feed placements. Beyond ~65, the visible part of the title gets cut off mid-word, hurting click-through.

Affects: title

Meta caps descriptions at 9,999 characters but truncates to ~90 in many placements. Long descriptions don't break catalogs but reduce visible content in product detail views.

Affects: description

Meta detected a brand in the feed that doesn't match what the landing page shows. Common when reseller catalogs use the store name instead of the manufacturer brand, or when feed-generation pulls the wrong field.

Affects: brand

The price's currency doesn't match the catalog's primary target region. UK catalog with USD prices, or EU catalog with GBP. Items still serve but conversions plummet because users see foreign pricing.

Affects: price

Meta's crawler can't reach the product page. 404, 500, redirect to non-product page, geo-restricted, or blocked by robots.txt. Items don't serve until reachable.

Affects: link

Meta hasn't received a feed update in longer than the schedule expected. Could be that the scheduled fetch failed, the feed file is unreachable, or someone disabled the data source.

Multiple items share near-identical titles or descriptions. Meta's classifier flags this as low-quality content and suppresses delivery across all affected items.

Affects: description

The product's category is restricted in the region the catalog targets. Common for alcohol in dry regions, supplements in regulated markets, or financial products where claims are tightly controlled.

Affects: google_product_category

Pixel is firing but with too few catalog-matching events for Meta to optimise effectively. Affects Advantage+ Catalog Ads which need event signal to allocate budget across products.

Affects: id

Meta increasingly requires country of origin disclosure for catalog items, especially cross-border. Items without it serve with reduced visibility in international placements.

Feed file exceeds Meta's size limits. For scheduled fetches the cap is roughly 8GB compressed; for the Catalog Batch API it's per-batch limits typically around 5,000 items.

Meta's processor timed out on the feed before completing. Combination of file size, server response speed, and parsing complexity. Items don't update until next successful fetch.

Apparel items without material specified. Meta increasingly uses material in audience segmentation for Advantage+ — items without it miss precision targeting opportunities.

Affects: material

Product set defined too restrictively for Advantage+ to optimise. Sets need a minimum item count (typically 30+) for the algorithm to learn within them. Below threshold, sets serve but don't optimise.

Product description lacks scannable bullet structure. Meta favours items with clear bullet-point highlights for catalog card visibility — pure paragraph descriptions get suppressed in scan-heavy placements.

Affects: description

Variants under one item_group_id have inconsistent colour formatting. Some say 'Navy', some 'NAVY', some 'navy' — Meta treats each as a different colour, fragmenting the variant group.

Affects: color