TikTok ShopCriticalSKU cannot be purchased or promoted through TikTok Shop

How to Fix “Inventory quantity is required” in TikTok Catalog

TikTok Shop reserves stock at the SKU level and therefore requires a numeric quantity. A keyword such as “in stock” or an empty cell blocks the row.

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Paste your product feed URL (XML, CSV or JSON). The audit checks Inventory quantity is required along with 25+ other pre-channel rules.

Why this happens

Technical root cause

Advertising feeds were designed around availability keywords, not quantities. When the same feed is reused for TikTok Shop, the numeric inventory column is simply not there.

TikTok Catalog reports it as Inventory quantity is required and applies: SKU cannot be purchased or promoted through TikTok Shop.

Native CMS friction

  • Shopify

    Inventory quantity is per location; a single number requires summing the locations you actually ship from.

  • VTEX

    Stock lives in logistics per warehouse and needs an aggregation step before it can be exported.

  • WooCommerce

    Products with stock management disabled expose only a status, never a quantity.

Fixing it manually

  1. 1

    Decide which warehouses or locations count as sellable stock.

  2. 2

    Aggregate their quantities into one integer per SKU.

  3. 3

    Send 0 rather than an empty value for sold-out SKUs.

  4. 4

    Refresh the feed often enough to reflect real availability.

The IRONFEED automated solution

One rule, applied to every product on every export. No spreadsheets, no re-uploads.

Rule syntax
IF inventory IS EMPTY OR NOT numeric
  SET inventory = sum(location_quantities)
  ELSE IF availability = 'in stock' SET inventory = 10 ELSE SET inventory = 0

Run automatic linter checks before TikTok Catalog crawls your feed. IRONFEED validates every export against the channel spec, so this error is caught in Feed Review instead of in your channel dashboard.

Start free trial See how mapping rules work

Attribute requirements

TikTok Catalog attribute requirements for Inventory quantity is required and the matching IRONFEED transformation
AttributeTikTok Shop requirementAccepted formatIRONFEED transformation
inventoryRequired for TikTok Shop SKUsNon-negative integerLocation aggregation with a safe keyword fallback
availabilityRequiredIN_STOCK | OUT_OF_STOCK | PREORDERDerived from the resulting quantity

Frequently asked questions

It can oversell. Use it only as a stopgap and connect real inventory as soon as possible.

At least hourly for fast-moving catalogs; TikTok blocks orders against stale quantities.

Related Feed Issues & Fixes

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SKU is an optional merchandising field in most storefronts. Products created quickly, or imported in bulk, frequently have no SKU at all, and the export writes an empty cell rather than deriving an identifier.

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Google Merchant CenterCritical

Image too small [image_link]

Feeds frequently export the thumbnail rendition instead of the master asset, because the thumbnail is the URL the storefront exposes first in its product payload.

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Feed URLs are generated from handles or IDs that change when products are renamed, archived or moved between categories, and stale exports keep pointing at the old path.

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