One product feed, three rule sets: Google, Meta, and TikTok

The pitch for multi-channel selling is that you maintain one product catalog and it flows everywhere. The reality is that you maintain one catalog and then quietly maintain three sets of exceptions, because Google Shopping, Meta Commerce, and TikTok Shop each grade the same feed against their own rulebook. A product that sails through one can get disapproved on another for a reason that does not exist on the first. Here is where the divergence actually lives.

Images

Google is the strictest on cleanliness: it wants a large image, plain background preferred, and zero promotional text or watermarks. Meta is more forgiving of lifestyle shots and people-in-frame, but it will still flag text overlays and badges. TikTok cares about aspect ratio more than the others, it favors portrait and square formats that fit a vertical feed, and a landscape-only image library will look wrong even when it is technically accepted. The practical consequence is that one image URL per product is not enough; you want a clean primary that satisfies Google and the option of a lifestyle or portrait variant for the others.

Identifiers

Google is aggressive about unique product identifiers (GTIN or MPN plus brand) and will suppress branded products that lack them. Meta is looser, it will take the product on brand and a retailer ID in more cases. TikTok sits in between and leans on category. If you built your identifier logic to satisfy Google, you are already covered everywhere else. If you built it to satisfy Meta, you will be surprised by Google. Build to the strictest standard, which is Google, and validate the identifier rather than passing through whatever sits in the barcode field.

Taxonomy

Each channel has its own category tree. Google has the Google product category taxonomy, a long official list. Meta maps to its own commerce categories. TikTok has yet another. Mis-categorize and you do not always get a hard rejection, you get something worse: the product shows, but to the wrong audience, and the spend underperforms for reasons that never appear in a disapproval report. Keep a single canonical category on each product and a per-channel mapping table, not a best-guess at export time.

Titles and attributes

Google reads the title hard for relevance and rewards front-loading the important words (brand, product, key attribute) within the first few. Meta surfaces less of the title and leans on the image and category. TikTok behaves more like a social feed, where the title is a hook. The same 150-character title is not optimal in all three. The durable approach is a structured product (brand, type, color, size, material as discrete fields) and a per-channel title template, so you compose the right title instead of writing three by hand.

Policy and restricted categories

Each platform bans or restricts a different set of products and claims. Supplements, alcohol, anything health-adjacent, and certain wording (“cures,” “best,” absolute claims) trip different wires on different channels. This is the one area where you genuinely cannot normalize, you have to know each platform’s current policy and gate products per channel.

The pattern that survives all three

Do not transform your catalog three times. Keep one canonical, richly-structured product as the source of truth, and treat each channel as a view over it: a mapping of categories, a title template, an image selection rule, an identifier policy, a restricted-category gate. When a channel changes its rules, and it will, you edit one view, not a tangle of per-channel scripts. The feed stops being three brittle exports and becomes one model with three lenses.

The plug

SnowPipe is built around exactly that model: one canonical product, per-channel transformation rules, and validation tuned to each destination so a row that would be disapproved gets caught before it ships. If you are pushing the same catalog to Google, Meta, or TikTok and maintaining the exceptions by hand, it is at pipe.snowforge.dev.