Short answer. A Pinterest product feed is a data source — a CSV, TSV or XML file Pinterest fetches from a URL about once a day — with seven required fields: id, title, description, link, image_link, price and availability, plus item_group_id for variants. Availability has three values, written with spaces, and backorder is not one of them. The requirement that decides whether any of it is worth doing is the image: at least 1000×1500.
Pinterest is a channel made entirely of photographs. Everything else in the feed — the price, the category, the description — decides where a product is shown. The picture decides whether it is shown at all, and Pinterest asks for a bigger one than any other channel a catalogue goes to. This guide is the format, the prerequisites, and the two settings you only get one shot at.
Everything below is from Pinterest's catalog requirements, their data source documentation, and the sample feed they publish — which is the only place the column names appear in full.
Before the feed: three things Pinterest checks
Unlike Google, Pinterest will not look at a catalogue from a shop it does not recognise. You need a business account, a claimed website, and the Pinterest tag installed. Claiming proves the domain is yours; the tag is how conversions are attributed later. Both are site changes rather than feed changes, so they are worth doing first — a feed that ingests perfectly into an unclaimed account still shows nothing.
The photo requirement, which is the whole story
Pinterest asks for product images of at least 1000×1500 pixels — portrait, a 2:3 shape. Google's minimum is 500×500 square and does not rise until January 2027. That is a six-fold difference in pixels and a different shape entirely.
The consequence catches almost every shop that tries Pinterest after Google: a product shot that passes everywhere else is too small here, and a catalogue cropped square — because square is what Google, Meta and the comparison sites wanted — is the wrong shape for the one channel where the picture is the ad. No feed tool can fix this. An upscaled photo looks worse than the original, and a feed that pads a square image into a portrait frame is shipping a product shot with white bars down the sides.
So the honest sequence is: check your photo sizes first, and decide whether Pinterest is worth a re-export from your source images before you build anything. Our free feed check measures the images in a feed you already have, and a Pinterest feed in FeedRobin counts how many products clear 1000×1500 before you connect anything.
The required fields
id— unique, up to 127 characters.title— up to 500 characters, and Pinterest asks that it match the landing page, variant included.description— up to 10,000 characters, plain text. HTML is not stripped for you on the way in; it is simply wrong here, and a store that keeps formatted descriptions needs them flattened before they are sent.link— the product page, up to 511 characters.image_link— up to 2,000 characters, and the size rule above.price—24.99 USD, or a bare number if the data source's Default currency is set. Write the currency: a default is invisible from inside the file.availability— see below.item_group_id— required for variants, up to 127 characters, and it is what groups a shirt's four sizes into one product rather than four.
Everything else is optional and worth sending: google_product_category and product_type (Pinterest reads Google's taxonomy), condition, brand, additional_image_link, sale_price, gender, age_group and size.
availability: three values, and no word for a backorder
Pinterest accepts in stock, out of stock and preorder, spaced, not Google's underscored spellings. There is no backorder value, so a product you can order today and ship next month has to go as a preorder — the same compromise Meta and Microsoft force, and the opposite of TikTok, which publishes "available for order" for exactly this case.
Sending "backorder", "available" or a translated word is sending a value their list does not contain. The availability value translator shows the same word as each channel wants it, side by side.
The file and the two settings you cannot revisit
Pinterest takes TSV, CSV, XML (RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0) and Google Sheets, compressed or not, in UTF-8. Their published sample is a TSV, and it is the only complete list of column names they give — so build against that, not against a Google feed you happen to have.
id,item_group_id,title,description,link,image_link,price,availability,condition PIN-101,PIN-1,Denim Shirt - Women's,Crafted from Japanese denim.,https://shop.example.com/p/101,https://cdn.example.com/101.jpg,24.99 USD,in stock,new
To connect it: the menu at the top left → Manage business → Catalogs and product groups → Add data source → Provide URL link. You give it a name, the URL, the file format, a country and language, a default currency, and optionally a login for a protected file. There is a Validate data source step that takes pasted sample rows — use it before you save, because it is the cheapest error report you will get.
Two of those fields are effectively permanent. The Country/region cannot be changed after the data source is created, and the default currency is the lens every bare price is read through. A data source built for the wrong market is replaced, not corrected.
How often it actually updates
A hosted data source is ingested about every 24 hours — some documentation says 24 to 48. This is worth knowing because it sets the ceiling on everything upstream: a feed rebuilt every hour still reaches Pinterest daily, and a price change made this afternoon is on Pinterest tomorrow. Anyone promising you minute-level freshness on this channel is describing their own refresh rate, not Pinterest's.
Manually uploaded files are worse: Pinterest asks that you re-upload every seven days to keep distribution. That alone is a reason to use a URL rather than a file.
Doing it without hand-building the file
FeedRobin renders the Pinterest catalog CSV from the same catalogue as your Google, Meta, TikTok and comparator feeds — their column names, their three availability words, HTML flattened out of descriptions, and a report telling you how many of your photos clear 1000×1500 before Pinterest does. You paste one link into the data source screen. The free feed check needs no account.
Sources
Pinterest Business Help, Get started with retail catalogs and Add your data source; Pinterest's sample product feed, which supplies the column names and their order. Read on 20 September 2026.