The Scenario
You are an ecommerce operations manager. The catalog restructure starts Monday. Your team has built a clean taxonomy of 20 new categories in an Excel workbook — Category Name in column A, Display Order in column B.
Before you can re-assign products to the new categories, the categories themselves have to exist in Omnisend. And you need the returned category IDs written back to the workbook, because your product re-assignment lookup reads from column B.
The bad version of this weekend:
- You open Omnisend's API docs and look up the category creation endpoint
- Write a script to loop through the 20 rows and POST each one
- Handle the returned ID and write it back to the workbook — if you are lucky
- Get a rate limit error on row 17
- Debug, re-run, realize rows 1 through 16 were already created
- Walk into Monday's standup having created 36 categories instead of 20.
The fast version is one prompt and the IDs are in the workbook before Monday.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the taxonomy workbook and calls Omnisend's category API for each row, writing the returned IDs back into the workbook without you touching the API docs.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Read my Excel catalog-taxonomy workbook (Category Name, Display Order) and bulk-create all product categories in Omnisend in one shot, then write the returned category IDs back into column B.
SheetXAI iterates through the rows, creates each category in Omnisend, and writes the returned ID into column B for that row. Twenty categories, twenty IDs in the workbook.
What You Get
A workbook with 20 new Omnisend categories created and their IDs written back:
- Category name — created exactly as listed in column A
- Returned category ID — written into column B for each row
- Display order — passed to Omnisend where supported
The IDs in column B are the key deliverable. Your product re-assignment lookup reads from there. If SheetXAI does not get an ID for a specific row, it writes an error note in that cell so you know exactly which category to retry.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Taxonomy workbooks built collaboratively always have inconsistencies. SheetXAI handles them before creating anything.
When category names have inconsistent capitalization
Some rows say "mens apparel," some say "Mens Apparel," some say "MENS APPAREL." Omnisend will create them as three separate categories.
Normalize all category names in column A to title case before creating them in Omnisend. Then create a category for each row and write the returned ID into column B.
When duplicate category names snuck in
Two team members added the same category independently. You want deduplication before anything is created.
Check column A for duplicate category names (case-insensitive). For any duplicate, keep the first occurrence and write "DUPLICATE — SKIPPED" into column B for the duplicate. Then create Omnisend categories for the unique rows only and write the returned IDs into column B.
When you need to map old category names to new ones
Column C has the old Omnisend category name that maps to each new category. You want it preserved for the re-assignment step.
Create each Omnisend category from column A. Write the returned category ID into column B. Leave column C (old category name) untouched — it is needed for the product re-assignment step.
When you want categories created and products re-assigned in one shot
After the categories are created, you want products moved to the new categories immediately.
First, create all 20 Omnisend categories from the Taxonomy tab column A and write the returned IDs into column B. Then, for each product in the Products tab, update its Omnisend category to the new category ID matching column C of the Taxonomy tab. Write the count of successfully re-assigned products into cell D1 of the Taxonomy tab.
The pattern: creation, write-back, and downstream re-assignment in one session.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any taxonomy workbook, then ask it to create the Omnisend categories and write the IDs back. The Omnisend integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to sync a product catalog into Omnisend from Excel or the Omnisend in Excel overview.