I have a question about csvs, basically I would like some clarity as to what exactly is the different in the product category data column vs the google shipping/google product category data columns, if there is any. I recently exported products from my store and opened it into google sheets. It shows column E is “Product Category”. Column AE is “Google Shopping / Google Product Category”. I see on the shopify help doc (link: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/import-export/using-csv#considerations-for-the-product-csv-file) for shopify csv that it looks like it says “Google Product Category” is the same as the Shopify product category. I assume Google Product Category refers to what I have in the column AE, and Shopify product category as the help doc describes is referring to what I have in column E. Is this correct or incorrect? Can you please clarify? Does shopify product category/taxonomy exactly match the kind google uses? I hope that made sense and let me know if there’s anything I can expand more on. I’m very confused and hope you can provide some clarity for this. Thank you.
2 Likes
I found this in the product category docs.
- If you already have a Google Product Category for your products and prefer to use this taxonomy, then Shopify maps the accurate product category to your products. Your Google Product Category needs to match Google’s values in English, or the ID number. Refer to the Google’s Product Category taxonomy for acceptable categories and IDs.
essentially, I think the main takeaways (someone correct me if I’m wrong please) are as follows:
- google product category/shopping is critical if you’re planning to advertise your products on 3rd party sites like google, facebook, etc
- shopify product category is helpful because it allows you to take advantage of shopify’s built-in product attributes for certain product types vs having to rely on creating a ton of custom metafields.