The Scenario
You are an ecommerce operations manager. Your catalog restructure kicks off Monday. The old Omnisend product catalog uses flat, ad hoc category tags accumulated over three years. Your team has built a clean taxonomy of 20 new categories in a Google Sheet — 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 sheet, because your product re-assignment script 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 sheet — if you are lucky your script does this cleanly
- Get a rate limit error on row 17
- Debug, re-run, realize rows 1 through 16 were already created
- You walk into Monday's standup having created 36 categories instead of 20.
The fast version is one prompt and the IDs are in the sheet before Monday.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the taxonomy sheet and calls Omnisend's category API for each row, writing the returned IDs back into the sheet without you touching the API docs.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create an Omnisend product category for every row in column A of this sheet — process all 20 rows and write the returned category ID back into column B.
SheetXAI iterates through the rows, creates each category in Omnisend, and writes the returned ID into the corresponding cell in column B. By the time it is done, column B has all 20 IDs.
What You Get
A sheet 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 if the endpoint supports it, so the catalog order matches your taxonomy
The IDs in column B are the key deliverable. Your product re-assignment script reads from there. If SheetXAI does not get an ID back for a specific row, it writes an error note in that cell so you know exactly which category to retry.
Once the IDs are in the sheet, ask SheetXAI to move on to the next step: re-assign products from the old categories to the new ones using the ID map.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Taxonomy sheets built collaboratively tend to 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 different 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 to deduplicate before creating.
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 second. 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
You have a third column, column C, with the old Omnisend category name that maps to each new category. You want this preserved in the sheet 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 re-assignment step after this.
When you want categories created and products re-assigned in one shot
The taxonomy sheet also has a product tab. After the categories are created, you want products moved to the new categories immediately.
First, create all 20 Omnisend categories from the Taxonomy sheet column A and write the returned IDs into column B. Then, for each product in the Products tab, update its Omnisend category assignment to the new category ID matching column C of the Taxonomy sheet. Report how many products were re-assigned successfully in cell D1 of the Taxonomy sheet.
The pattern: creation and write-back in one instruction, then the downstream re-assignment in the same session.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any taxonomy or category list sheet, 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 full product catalog into Omnisend or the Omnisend in Google Sheets overview.