The Scenario
An e-commerce data analyst at a retail intelligence firm needs to map Best Buy's category hierarchy into an Excel workbook. Her team is building a data enrichment pipeline that maps client product catalogs to major retailer taxonomies. Best Buy is the first. She needs category ID, category name, parent category ID, and subcategory count — one row per category — so the engineering team can build a lookup table from it by end of sprint.
The bad version:
- Attempt to scrape Best Buy's category navigation manually from the website
- Realize the nav only shows two levels and the actual taxonomy has five
- Test the categories endpoint in Postman, export the JSON, write a flattening script
- Debug the parent ID logic for two hours and send engineering a half-flattened CSV
You don't have time for that.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads your data and talks to Best Buy for you. No API exploration, no JSON flattening, no custom scripts.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Pull the Best Buy category list and populate my Excel sheet with category ID, name, and parent category ID for all categories in the catalog
What You Get
- One row per category — category ID, human-readable name, and parent category ID written into your Excel sheet
- The full hierarchy flattened into tabular rows so every level of the taxonomy is addressable by ID
- Root-level categories have a blank parent category ID, making depth-level filtering straightforward
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
When you also need subcategory count and want the full four-column set
Pull all Best Buy product categories into my Excel workbook and write category ID, category name, parent category ID, and subcategory count — one row per category
When you need only the top two levels
Pull Best Buy product categories, filter to top-level categories and their direct children, and write category ID, category name, and parent category ID into my Excel sheet — one row per category
When you need to join category IDs against a product list on another worksheet
Pull all Best Buy product categories into an Excel worksheet named BB Categories with category ID and name, then look up the category ID in column D of the Products worksheet and fill the matching category name in column E
When you want it all in one shot
Pull all Best Buy product categories into my Excel workbook — write category ID, category name, parent category ID, subcategory count, and full path (e.g., Electronics > Computers > Laptops), then add a ROOT, BRANCH, or LEAF label in the final column based on parent ID and subcategory count, sorted by full path alphabetically.
The pattern: instead of flattening the taxonomy manually and then annotating the rows, you ask for both the data and the classification in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook. Ask it to pull Best Buy's full category taxonomy. The Best Buy integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related tasks, see Pull a Filtered Best Buy Category Listing Into an Excel workbook or the Best Buy in Excel overview.