Shopify product category vs Google product category: how they relate to your feeds

Two different columns, one export

Open Shopify’s official product CSV template and you will find both Product category and Google Shopping / Google product category. They are not the same field and neither is derived from the other.

• Product category is a value from Shopify’s own taxonomy. It drives things inside Shopify, and Shopify uses it to generate suggestions — the documentation notes that this information is used to generate a product category suggestion powered by Shopify Magic.
• Google Shopping / Google product category is the Merchant Center attribute: a value from Google’s 5,595-category taxonomy, by ID or exact path.

The categories the official mapping cannot map are exactly the ones that needed a judgement call anyway.

Does Shopify fill the Google one in for you?

Not as far as Shopify documents. It is worth being precise about this, because the assumption is widespread.

For the Meta channel, Shopify does document auto-filling the Google product category. For the Google & YouTube channel, no Shopify documentation we could find says the Shopify taxonomy is mapped onto google_product_category. What Shopify does say about that channel is the opposite in spirit: if you don’t add a product category, then Google automatically assigns a category to the product, but you might encounter errors.

So the safe assumption is that the Google column is yours to fill. If your store happens to have it populated, check where the value came from before relying on the mechanism.

The mapping that does exist, and where it stops

Shopify publishes its taxonomy openly, including integration mappings, in the Shopify/product-taxonomy repository. The Google mapping there is real and large — on the order of fourteen thousand rules — and it is worth knowing three things about it:

• It is one-directional: Shopify category → Google category. There is no reverse.
• It ships an explicit unmapped list. Not every Shopify category has a Google counterpart, so a mapping-only approach leaves holes.
• It targets a specific Google taxonomy version. Since Google accepts any version published after August 2011 and translates it forward, that is tolerable — but it means the mapping and the current taxonomy are not the same thing.

The practical reading: a mapping is a good first pass and a poor final answer. It gets the easy ones right and leaves you the ambiguous ones, which were always the ones needing judgement.

The re-import that wipes your categories

Shopify’s documentation states that if a non-required column in the import CSV file is blank, then the matching value in the product list is overwritten as blank. A re-import with an empty category column does not skip the field. It clears it.

This is how a tidy-up turns into a day of recovery. Two rules avoid it: import only the columns you intend to change, and never re-upload a trimmed-down export.

A related note from the same documentation: a product created by CSV or by an app can end up uncategorised in Shopify’s own taxonomy, because all products should be assigned a Shopify product category. If a category isn’t assigned, then your product saves as uncategorized. This could also happen if a product is created with CSV or an app. So a store built by import often has both columns empty, not just the Google one.

Filling the Google column for a real store

Export your products, and the file you get is the input our Bulk Category Mapper expects: point it at the title column and the handle or ID column, and it returns the same rows with the Google category, its numeric ID, the full path and a confidence figure. Variants of one product resolve to one decision and are charged once, which matters on Shopify where a shirt in five sizes and four colours is twenty rows.

Then paste the ID column into a two-column import — handle plus Google Shopping / Google product category — and nothing else, for the reason in the previous section.

Submit the numeric ID rather than the path. Google accepts either and recommends the ID, and an ID cannot be broken by a renamed category or a mangled ampersand in a CSV.

One more Shopify thing that moved

Shopify sunset its own Product Reviews app, and its help centre now documents migrating those reviews into another app rather than exporting them. If you are trying to read your reviews at volume, the export lives in whichever review app you use — the Shopify review page covers where to find it, including the export limits in Judge.me.