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Bulk Category Creation for BigCommerce

· 2 min read
Subin Paul
Subin Paul
Technical Project Manager, e-commerce and innovations @ Neopraxis innovations

The Challenge of Category Management in BigCommerce​

BigCommerce is a powerful e-commerce platform, but it lacks a native feature for creating categories in bulk. This can be a major pain point for merchants with large catalogs, especially when migrating from other platforms.

Our Experience: Migrating from Hybris​

We recently encountered this challenge when migrating a store from Hybris to BigCommerce. The store had around 2000 categories, organized in a tree structure with up to 6 levels of parent-child relationships. Manually creating these categories in BigCommerce would have been incredibly time-consuming.

The problem is utmost important to be solved because there are around 7000 SKUs to be imported. While importing products, BigCommerce requires category ID to be specified in the import CSV.

Our Solution: A Bulk Category Management Tool​

To overcome this limitation, we developed a tool that allows merchants to create, update, delete, and export categories in bulk using a CSV template.

The Results: Significant Time Savings, no more complexity to import category trees​

While preparing the CSV template took some effort, our tool was able to create all 2000 categories in BigCommerce in less than 10 minutes. This saved us countless hours of manual work.

Key Features of Our Tool​

  • CSV-Based: Easily manage categories using a simple CSV template.
  • Bulk Operations: Create, update, and delete categories in bulk.
  • Efficient: Create thousands of categories in minutes.
  • Smart: Provided that the input file is prepared in our simple template, it creates many levels of parent child relationship in the category tree like cakewalk. No more tedious multistep category migration.

What's Next?​

This tool is currently available to our internal teams and select client merchants. We plan to release it to the public soon, making it easier for all BigCommerce users to manage their categories efficiently. Stay tuned for updates!