How to read item errors and review statuses in a Meta catalogue

If products in your catalogue have issues or certain statuses, Meta may not show them in your ads or your shop on Facebook and Instagram, and they may not be eligible for product tagging on Instagram [1]. You can notice this in three places: as a product issue in Commerce Manager, as a product missing from your shop, or as an "Items invalid" warning or error in the Delivery column of Meta Ads Manager [1].

Each signal comes from a different layer, so first work out which one you are looking at.

Where to look

In Commerce Manager, select your catalogue and go to Catalog > Products. The filters on the right let you narrow down two different things [1]:

• Status: for example products that are Archived or Hidden from Shops.
• Issues: split by channel into Advantage+ catalog ads and Shops and Marketplace.

When you open a single product, the Status and issues tab shows whether anything prevents it from appearing in ads or your shop [2].

A product can be fine for ads and not for your shop, or the other way round. Out-of-stock products, for instance, are not shown in ads, but they stay in shops on Facebook and Instagram for up to 56 days, marked as sold out; after that they no longer appear in the shop either [1].

A status is not an issue

"Archived" or "hidden from shops" is not an error; it is a decision made by you or by your data source. An archived product is not shown in your ads, your shop or anywhere else, and you make it active again if you want it to appear [1]. Issues, on the other hand, are problems Meta detects in the product data: missing required attributes (title, description, price, availability, product link, condition or image link), broken links, image download problems, prices outside the supported range, and so on [1].

Products rejected for policy reasons

Products in a catalogue go through an automatic review for policy compliance. Products that do not comply with the Meta Advertising Standards are not shown in ads; products that do not comply with the Commerce Policies are not shown in your shop and cannot be tagged [3]. Because the two policies are designed for different uses, a product can be allowed in ads but not for sale in a shop [4].

Non-compliant products show as rejected in the catalogue [3]. If you believe a rejection is wrong, you can request another review in Commerce Manager or in Business Support Home; Meta allows up to 5,000 products to be submitted for review every 7 days, and reviews typically take up to a few days [3]. Two details are easy to miss [3]:

• Editing a product cancels any pending review.
• Once a review is complete, you cannot request another review for the same products unless you edit them first.

When you edit a rejected product so that it complies, it is reviewed again automatically [3]. If the product comes from a partner platform such as Shopify, fix the data on that platform; a review of a policy rejection can still be requested directly in Commerce Manager [10].

One more point: according to Meta, editing most product data sends the product through review each time, making it temporarily unavailable for ads until the review is complete. Price, availability, quantity and internal labels can be edited without triggering a new review [8]. On the shop side, product approval usually takes only a few seconds, but some items need a more detailed review that can take longer [9].

Errors and warnings at feed level

If products arrive through a data feed, start at Catalog > Data sources. The feed overview summarises the last upload session, and Download issue report gives you a sample of the issues [5]. Meta notes that some errors affect the whole feed and may stop it from uploading (the file cannot be accessed, an unsupported format, an incorrect number of columns), while others affect only certain products [5].

The developer documentation expresses the same split as severity: fatal means the item cannot be ingested by Meta; warning means some recommended attributes are missing or malformed [6]. A full error report includes the retailer ID of the affected item, the error message, the severity, the field name, the affected capabilities and whether the error blocks that capability [6].

Review statuses read through the API

If you work with the catalogue programmatically, the Graph API Product Item lists these fields [7]:

• review_status: values empty, pending, rejected, approved, outdated.
• capability_to_review_status: a review status per capability, with values NO_REVIEW, PENDING, REJECTED, APPROVED, OUTDATED.
• review_rejection_reasons and errors.

The reference lists these values without defining them [7], so avoid reading meaning into them.

A practical reading order

1. Check whether the product's status (archived, hidden) is a deliberate decision.
2. See which channel the issue belongs to: ads or shop.
3. For a policy rejection, choose between requesting a review and editing the data; do not do both at once.
4. For a data issue, fix it at the source the product comes from.
5. At feed level, use fatal versus warning to prioritise.