16,000 products is a lot to handle manually, but it’s very doable with the right approach. Here are practical answers to both questions:
1. Bulk category assignment
There’s no “accept all suggestions” button in Shopify. The fastest manual method is the bulk editor — go to Products, select all, click Bulk edit, add the Product category column, and work through them in batches. You can filter by uncategorized to focus on what’s missing.
If you have any dev resources, the productUpdate GraphQL mutation lets you set standardizedProductType programmatically. You could write a script that reads your supplier’s product types and maps them to Shopify’s taxonomy. For 16,000 products this would take minutes to run vs days of manual work.
2. HS codes at scale
The key insight is that 16,000 SKUs doesn’t mean 16,000 unique HS codes. Most catalogs only need 50-100 distinct codes because many products share the same classification. The approach is:
First, group your products by product type or category. If your supplier provides any kind of categorization, use that as the starting point.
Second, figure out the correct HS code for each product type once. The WCO Harmonized System has 97 chapters — most consumer goods fall into predictable ones (apparel Ch. 61-62, electronics Ch. 84-85, toys Ch. 95, cosmetics Ch. 33, etc.). The official free lookup is at hts.usitc.gov for US codes or trade-tariff.service.gov.uk for UK.
Third, apply in bulk using the Duties & Import Taxes CSV. Go to Settings → Taxes & Duties → Manage → Update with CSV → Export. You’ll get a spreadsheet with every product. Use VLOOKUP in Excel or Google Sheets to match your product type → HS code mapping, fill the column, and re-import. For 16,000 products with 50-100 unique codes, this takes an afternoon.
The product category assignment in step 1 actually helps with step 2, because Shopify’s taxonomy maps loosely to HS chapters. Get the categories right first, then the HS codes become much easier to determine.