For arlanix/product-feed 1.0
Google categories
Every shopping platform classifies a product by Google's product taxonomy: Merchant Center calls the field google_product_category, Microsoft calls it product_category, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat use Google's name and Google's list. The Google categories section of a feed maps your Magento categories to that list, and the mapping row every platform catalog adds reads from it.
The section
- Default Google category: used for products whose own categories have no assignment below. Leave it empty to send nothing rather than something wrong; a platform would rather have no category than the wrong one.
- Assign a category: one row per Magento category, with a search box over Google's taxonomy. A product takes the assignment of the deepest of its categories that has one, so assigning Furniture covers every category under it until a deeper one says otherwise.
- Copy fills the table with another feed's assignments, so a Pinterest feed starts from what the Google feed already decided.
The assignments belong to the feed and are saved with it. A product may also carry the category itself, in a product attribute named google_product_category: that wins over the assignments, and the assignments win over the default.
The taxonomy
The taxonomy is fetched from Google the first time the category search asks for it, in the locale set under Stores → Configuration → Arlanix → Feeds → Google product categories, en-US unless changed. If Google cannot be reached, the search falls back to the en-US file bundled with the module and the reason goes to var/log/arlanix.log. The same configuration group holds a store-wide Default Google category, as the number Google gives the category (the first column of Google's taxonomy with ids, 4143 for Tablecloths), for a shop that sells one kind of thing and would rather not set it on every feed.
A Merchant Center feed may name a Taxonomy locale of its own in its Channel section, for a data source in another language; see Google Merchant Center.