Product Catalog for Telegram Stores

A telegram catalog bot replaces the pinned-messages mess that passes for a shop in most channels: products live in a structured catalog with categories, prices, photos and stock — searchable, filterable and always current, inside the messenger the buyer already has open. This page covers how the catalog works here and what a catalog-first seller should check before launching.

Catalog structure: categories and cards

The catalog is a two-level tree: categories become the storefront's navigation, and product cards fill them. A card carries:

• Name, price and description — the basics, edited in a visual form with a live preview.
• Up to five photos — the first becomes the cover; the gallery opens full-size in the storefront.
• Variants — "Size: XL, +200 ₽": options with their own price deltas, ordered per product. The chosen variant is snapshotted into the order, so later edits to the variant list never rewrite past orders.
• Stock tracking — optional. Track remaining units (with a low-stock alert when fewer than three are left) or switch it off entirely for made-to-order and digital goods.
• A promo flag — featured products rotate in the first screen's banner carousel.

The structure is deliberately boring: no nested subcategories five levels deep, no attribute schemas to configure before your first product. Clothing stores — the most variant-hungry niche — run on exactly this model: one category per product line, sizes and colors as variants.

Search inside the bot

The storefront ships with a real search box, not a "press /3 to browse" teleprompter:

• Live search over product names and descriptions, debounced as the buyer types.
• Sorting — by price, by novelty — and category filters alongside it.
• Price range filters for window-shoppers with a budget.
• Shareable URLs — every search, filter and sort state is encoded in the storefront link, so "here, I filtered it to hoodies under 5 000 ₽" is a link you can send in one chat message.

Search matters more in Telegram than on a website: buyers open the storefront mid-conversation, with a specific question. A catalog that cannot be searched turns the bot into a channel with extra steps — the telegram shop bot page describes the full buyer journey from the catalog to checkout.

Adding products: by hand today, CSV on the roadmap

Honest status: there is no CSV/YML import in the product today. Products are added one by one in the visual editor — a plain card takes under a minute, a variant-heavy one perhaps three. For the free plan's fifteen products that is a single sitting; for a Pro-tier catalog of a hundred and fifty, an afternoon with coffee.

Bulk import (CSV, and the YML format the RU market expects) is on the roadmap. The editor's advice for sellers migrating a large existing assortment: start with the twenty products that actually sell, launch, and backfill the long tail while orders arrive — the same lean-launch pattern the launch guide teaches.

When the catalog outgrows the free plan's fifteen products, the upgrade raises the ceiling without touching the storefront — buyers never see a difference. Payments connect per product in the same editor, and the payment gateway page walks that screen in detail.