The Scenario
An e-commerce data analyst at a retail intelligence firm needs to map Best Buy's category hierarchy into a Google Sheet. 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 of hierarchy and the actual taxonomy has five
- Find the Best Buy API docs, read through the categories endpoint, test it in Postman
- Export the JSON, write a flattening script, debug the parent ID logic for two hours
- Send engineering a half-flattened CSV that still has nested arrays in the subcategory column
You don't have time for that.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet 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:
Fetch all Best Buy product categories and write category ID, category name, parent category ID, and subcategory count into my sheet — one row per category
What You Get
- One row per category in Best Buy's taxonomy — category ID, human-readable category name, parent category ID, and total subcategory count
- The full hierarchy flattened into a tabular format so every level is a row rather than a nested object
- Root-level categories have a blank parent category ID, making them easy to filter or pivot by depth
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
When you need only the top two levels of the hierarchy
Fetch Best Buy product categories, filter to top-level categories and their direct children only, and write category ID, category name, and parent category ID into my sheet — one row per category
When you need to join category IDs against a product list in another tab
Fetch all Best Buy product categories, write category ID and category name into a tab called "BB Categories", then in the "Products" tab use the category ID in column D to look up and fill the category name in column E
When you want subcategory paths rather than just parent IDs
Fetch all Best Buy product categories and write category ID, category name, parent category ID, and full category path (e.g., "Electronics > Computers > Laptops") into my sheet — one row per category
When you want it all in one shot
Fetch all Best Buy product categories, write category ID, category name, parent category ID, subcategory count, and full path into my sheet, then add a column flagging each row as ROOT, BRANCH, or LEAF based on whether it has a parent ID and subcategory count greater than zero — sorted by full path alphabetically.
The pattern: instead of flattening the hierarchy 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 Google Sheet. 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 a Google Sheet or the Best Buy in Google Sheets overview.