Catalog rules

As a connected operator, you can create catalog rules based on your product requirements. This feature validates the sellers’ products against these requirements before vetting (if enabled) or before the product goes online in the marketplace. You can also delete and edit catalog rules. In the Invalid ads export, the catalog errors are included.

The sellers can save the changes they made on the products and variants, but they cannot progress to operator vetting until the product and at least one published variant pass the catalog rules requirements.

Catalog rules ensure that:

• You only vet products that meet the requirements that you set, which reduces the vetting workload.
• The Sellers get feedback for the products that do not meet the rules set by the Operators.

For detailed instructions on creating catalog rules, see Create catalog rules.

Elements of Catalog rules

Attributes

You can set requirements for product and variant attributes using catalog rules. For example, you might require that a Product title contains certain words, or that a Variant SKU must be present.

Product/variant attributes can have rules such as the number of characters they must include, the amount, what they must or must not contain, or whether the attribute is required.

To create a rule for an attribute, go to ADVERTS > Catalog rules > + Create new rule and select from the available product/variant attributes in the Attribute dropdown.

For the complete list of available product and variant attributes, and the conditions they support, see Conditions and the attributes they support.

Condition

The selected condition specifies the requirement for the product’s attribute. These are the conditions you can select from. Please note that not all conditions are available for all attributes. For more details about conditions, see Understanding Catalog Rule Conditions (for Data Validation).

Value

The value specifies the required or allowed value for the selected attribute of the product.

Single value

For most conditions, you enter a single value (e.g., a number or word).

Example: single value
If you want to create a catalog rule that requires sellers to write a product description that is greater than 300 characters, you can select:

• Attribute: Product description
• Condition: greater than
• Value: 300

The default error message is: “Product description must be greater than 300 characters.”

Multiple values

Some text-based conditions support multiple values (up to 600 per rule). These include the text based-conditions such as:

• Contain
• Not contain
• Contain at least one of
• Not contain exact word or phrase
• Start with
• Not start with
• Not contain HTML

When you choose one of these conditions, you can:

• Add multiple values manually or paste them from a spreadsheet.
• Enter a Value set name. This is a label for the group of values you entered. It’s used in the error message shown to sellers, so the message remains shorter and easier to read.

Example: multiple values
If you want product descriptions to contain at least one positive term, you can select:

• Attribute: Product description
• Condition: contain at least one of
• Values: durable, premium, high-quality, reliable
• Value set name: positive terms

The default error message is: “Product description must contain at least one of the positive terms.”

Add categories (optional)

You can scope catalog rules to apply only to products in a specific category (and its subcategories). You can read more on this in the Category-specific catalog rule article.

When creating a new rule, use the Add categories field to select the category where the rule should apply.

• If no category is selected, the rule applies marketplace-wide.
• If a category is selected, only products within that category (and its subcategories) are validated against the rule.

For example, you want to create a catalog rule that requires sellers to write a product description that is greater than 10 characters for products in the Shirts category. You can select:

• Attribute: Product description
• Condition: greater than
• Category: Shirts
• Value: 10

The default error message is: “Product description must be greater than 10 characters.",  which only applies to the products under the Shirts category.