Not everything in life is easy. Obviously, else I would be a billionaire by now. Adding the Google Product Category to Shopify is one of those not-easy things: I don’t know why they missed it because Shopify thought of most other things.
But here we go. The Google Product Category is a field which you really should add to your Google Shopping feed. It used to be mandatory and though it isn’t any more, it’s still a good idea to add it if you can. The better your feed the better the results you get from Google Shopping.
Definitions first: the Google Product Category is a classification Google uses to understand all the different types of product there are in the world. They have developed a sophisticated and extensive classification scheme, or taxonomy (the word they use). If you don’t know the code for each of your products then you need to download this file and then figure them out. It’s not too difficult, and it’s worth taking the time to select the most precise code.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to load the codes into Shopify. But guess what, you can’t. At least not directly. There is no field in the Shopify back office where you can enter them.
Luckily, that field does exist, but you need to
- export your products into a spreadsheet
- enter the codes in the sheet and then
- import them back into your Shopify site.
To be honest, you’d probably want to use a spreadsheet for this operation anyway. Whole swathes of your products will all share the same code and copying and pasting is a much easier way to fill them in than entering everything individually in the back office.
The column where the codes go is called “Google Shopping / Google Product Category”. And you can enter either the code number or the long string. I’ve tried both and in the end I prefer the long string, it’s much easier in the future when you need to go back and check something.
Okay, that’s probably all the explanation many of you will need. You can stop reading now and go to work. Thanks for the backlink, winking face.
If you are not sure how to export from Shopify, you just go to the back office, select Products then Export then select All products and you’re done. Once you’ve added the codes, importing is similar. Just make sure you save your file in CSV format. As shown in the screenshot above, you only need three columns when you import:
- Handle
- Title
- Google Shopping / Google Product Category
And you’re done! Good luck.