Once your product catalogue is set up, every product in it becomes instantly searchable and taggable anywhere in your community. A community manager writing a post can tag a product in seconds. A member browsing a thread can tap a product and land directly on the purchase page. The catalogue is what makes that possible.
Getting it set up takes less time than most teams expect. This guide walks through how to add products, what makes each entry work well for community discovery, how to manage status over time, and how to structure permissions so the catalogue stays accurate as your team grows.
Adding Products: CSV or Manual
The catalogue supports two ways to add products: CSV import and manual entry. Both work well. The right choice comes down to where your product data already lives.
If your products exist in a spreadsheet anywhere, CSV is faster. Export your existing product data, map it to the required fields (thumbnail, Product ID, product name, price, URL, status), and import. The whole catalogue can be live in minutes. You can also use partial CSV uploads when you need to update a subset of products, which keeps the process fast for ongoing changes.
If you are starting fresh or adding a small number of products, manual entry is straightforward. Fill in the fields directly for each product and it is immediately searchable and ready to tag. There is no minimum or maximum. Manual works just as well for five products as it does for five hundred.
Most teams start with whichever method matches their current situation and switch between them as needed. CSV is useful for large initial uploads or batch updates. Manual is useful for adding individual products as they come in, making quick corrections, or updating a single entry without touching the rest of the catalogue.
- A useful habit for CSV updates: When updating specific products, only include the rows and fields that are changing. There is no need to re-upload products that have not changed, and keeping the update file focused reduces the chance of accidental overwrites.
What Makes a Product Easy to Find and Tap On
Each product entry has a small number of fields. How you fill them in determines how discoverable and trustworthy the product feels to community members when they encounter it in a post.
Product name: use the name members recognize. When a community member sees a product tagged in a post, or searches for it in the catalogue, they are looking for a name they know. The name that belongs in the catalogue is the one they would say out loud or type into a search, not an internal product code or a truncated SKU.
Thumbnail: clean and readable at small sizes. Product tags display the thumbnail at a compact size alongside the name and price. A clear product shot against a plain background reads immediately at that scale. A complex lifestyle image or a busy scene tends to lose its meaning when small, which makes the tag feel less recognizable.
URL: go directly to the product page. When a member taps a tagged product, they should land exactly where they need to be to learn more or purchase. A direct product page URL removes every unnecessary step between interest and action.
Price: keep it current. The price displayed in a product tag is what members see before they tap through. If it does not match what they find on the product page, it creates friction and erodes trust in the tag. Keeping prices in sync with your primary commerce system is one of the simplest ways to protect the quality of the product tagging experience.
Managing Status: Active and Archive
Every product in the catalogue has one of two statuses: Active or Archive.
Active products are discoverable and taggable across the community. Archive products are not visible to members and cannot be tagged in posts. Archiving a product does not delete it. The record is preserved, including its history of tagging data , but it removes it from community discovery until it is made active again.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that Active status should reflect real availability. A member who taps a tagged product and finds it out of stock or unavailable has a broken experience. That single interaction is enough to reduce how much they trust product tags going forward.
The simplest way to stay on top of this is to connect catalogue status updates to the same workflow you already use when products change availability in your commerce system. When a product sells out or a collection turns over, updating the catalogue status in the same step keeps the two in sync without requiring a separate audit.
- Archive vs. Delete: Archive products that are temporarily unavailable or that may return. Delete only what you are certain is gone permanently. Archived products retain their tagging history, which is useful when you want to review past engagement data or reactivate a product later.
Permissions: Keeping the Catalogue Accurate as Your Team Grows
The catalogue has three permission levels: Create, Update, and Delete. Assigning them thoughtfully from the start keeps the catalogue consistent as more people interact with it.
Create is best held by the person or team responsible for product data: an e-commerce manager, a merchandising lead, or whoever manages brand partner relationships. Not every community manager needs to be able to add new products.
Update can be extended to community managers who need to change status or correct a price or URL. The key is that anyone with Update access understands what the product name and thumbnail standards are, since inconsistencies there affect every post that product is tagged in.
Delete should stay with administrators. Deleting a product is permanent and removes its association with all historical tagging data. It is an action that warrants a restricted level of access.
A practical starting model: one or two people hold Create and Delete. Community managers hold Update for status and minor corrections. Everyone else can tag products in posts without touching the catalogue itself.
Once the Catalogue Is Live
The moment products are added and set to Active, they are searchable and ready to tag anywhere in the community. There is no additional configuration step between setting up the catalogue and community members being able to discover products through content.
From there, keeping the catalogue useful is mostly about staying on top of status. Products change availability, collections turn over, and prices update. A catalogue that reflects what is actually available right now is one that members can trust every time they tap through a tag.
The partial CSV update makes ongoing maintenance fast. Export the rows that need changing, update them, import the file. For most teams, a brief monthly check is enough to catch anything that has drifted.