Facebook and Instagram shops in 2026: the storefront is gone, the catalog remains

You can no longer set up a Facebook and Instagram shop in Finland the way you used to. In 2023, Meta limited standalone shop storefronts (Shops) to a handful of European countries, and Finland wasn’t one of them. Product visibility on Meta is now built on the product catalog: it powers product tags in posts and catalog ads, and the purchase itself happens in your own online store.

What happened to Meta’s shops

The original idea was a free storefront: a business gathered its products on a shop tab on its Facebook and Instagram profiles, where customers could browse the range without leaving the app.

That’s been wound down in stages. In August 2023, Meta removed shop storefronts from most European countries, Finland included. In 2025, Meta also dropped in-app checkout, and purchases are directed to the online store. There’s no separate shop button anymore, so don’t go looking for one in your settings.

The direction is clear: Meta is no longer building its own marketplace, it’s sending buyers to businesses’ online stores. Product data still flows through Meta’s systems, though, which is why the catalog matters more than ever.

The catalog is the part worth setting up

The product catalog is a database of your products that lives in Meta’s Commerce Manager: names, prices, images, availability, and links to product pages. Customers never see it as such, but all product visibility on Meta is built on top of it.

The catalog lets you do two things. With product tags, you tag products in posts and ads, so a customer gets from the product details to your online store in one click. In catalog advertising, Advantage+ campaigns automatically pick the right products from the catalog for the right people, both new audiences and people who’ve already visited your site. Catalog ads are typically the most productive part of an online store’s Meta advertising, because the ad shows exactly the products a customer has viewed or ones similar to them.

How to set up your product catalog

1. Create the catalog in Commerce Manager under your company’s Business Manager account.
2. Bring in your product data with a product feed. From Shopify and WooCommerce the feed flows through a ready-made integration; from other platforms, use a feed file or a feed tool. We wrote a separate article on this: what is a product feed.
3. Connect the Meta pixel or the Conversions API to the catalog, so your ads can show customers the products they’ve browsed.
4. Check the quality of your feed. Missing images, prices, and GTIN codes directly weaken ad delivery.

When your e-commerce platform is a common one and your product data is in order, setup typically takes a few hours.

When a catalog is worth it

A product catalog is worth it practically always when you sell products online and advertise on Meta. Without a catalog, every product ad is built by hand, and retargeting stays at the level of generic messages. With a catalog, your advertising scales to the whole range without creating a separate ad for every product.

For a service business, a catalog is rarely useful. In that case, put the effort into regular conversion campaigns and content instead.

If you set up a Facebook shop back in the day with this article’s original instructions, you don’t need to do anything about the storefront itself. It’s already gone. Do check in Commerce Manager that your catalog and feed are still up to date, because the same catalog powers your catalog advertising.

We help online stores get their product catalog and catalog advertising in shape as part of paid social.