Catalog Video starts from a data source — any structured list of the things you sell. Several on-ramps exist so you can start from whatever you have.
Ways to connect
Paste your shop URL (best for small shops). Point us at your Etsy storefront, Shopify site, or any page listing your products. Wavemaker extracts products — titles, prices, images, links — into a catalog behind the scenes and shows a visual product picker. No spreadsheet, no mapping, no feed vocabulary.
Upload product photos. A folder of photos is a valid catalog — each photo becomes an item.
CSV / Excel / Google Sheets. Upload a file or connect a Sheet. Wavemaker proposes a column mapping (which column is the title, the price, the image URL…) that you confirm once; the mapping is remembered for every future sync.
Shopify / Google Merchant Center / Meta Catalog. Connect the store or feed you already maintain. Your existing feed remains the source of truth — we read it, never modify it.
What happens at ingest
Every row is normalized into a consistent shape while preserving every original column (nothing is dropped — custom fields remain available for template bindings and targeting labels):
- Core fields: id, title, description, price, sale price, availability, brand, category, link, images, item group.
- Per-item validation — Merchant-Center-style diagnostics: missing IDs or titles, unparseable prices, duplicate IDs, missing or unreachable images, low-resolution images. Errors block the row; warnings don’t.
- Ad-readiness score per item — a quick read on how well each product will render.
Image preparation (automatic)
Feed images are the #1 quality risk in catalog advertising — packshots mixed with lifestyle shots, thumbnails, watermarks, wrong shapes. Every image that actually gets used goes through an automatic prep pipeline:
- Best-image selection — when an item has several photos, a vision pass picks the best one for each slot (a clean packshot for the hero, a lifestyle shot for the mood scene).
- Normalization — borders trimmed so products render full-size; images fitted to the template’s shape with brand-color or blurred fill (never black bars, which ad platforms reject).
- Quality floor — an item whose images are too poor is flagged, not silently shipped. If the item has a product-page link, Wavemaker can fetch better images from the page itself.
- Display copy cleanup — SEO-stuffed titles (“Wireless Earbuds Bluetooth 5.3 40H Playtime IPX7…”) get a clean, human display title and one-line benefit for on-screen and spoken use. You can edit these; the raw title stays available.
Preparation is lazy and cached: it runs only for items you actually select into a campaign, and never re-runs for unchanged images — a 100k-item feed with a 5k-item campaign pays for 5k.
Keeping it in sync
Sources can refresh on a schedule (see Sync & freshness) or manually. Each sync diffs by content: new items appear, vanished items drop from delivery immediately, and changed items re-render only what the change actually touches.