RE: Product Categories missing from "products" endpoint

[Shopping API Forum Advisor Prod]

Hi  Google Shopping Team

merchant center account: xxxxxxx
We are having problem to fetch products' "googleProductCategory" when using google's auto assigned categories.

here is the screenshot of one of the product: xxxxx
However, we can confirm all the products have google auto assigned categories: xxxxxxxx
Please advice how can we fetch the google assigned product categories

Thank you very much.

Kevin


 

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[Shopping API Forum Advisor Prod]

Hi Kevin,

I have redacted your post online since the post contains sensitive information. For any future posts, please make sure not to post sensitive information on the forum. The current behavior of API is to return the attributes provided by the merchants. For more information please refer to the googleProductCategory description in the link: https://developers.google.com/shopping-content/reference/rest/v2.1/products?hl=en

I will forward your request as a feature request to the rest of the team. Please keep an eye on the blog for feature announcements and future releases.
https://ads-developers.googleblog.com/search/label/content_api

Thanks,

Lakshmi Prathipati Content API for Shopping Team

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[Shin]

Hi Lakshmi

If I understand correctly, shopping API 2.1 only returns product categories only if the merchant supplied them. On the other hand, the crawling feature has become extremely popular nowadays,

and in most cases, the categories are all auto assigned by google. This will become a major bug/discrepancies, if merchants can see the auto assigned product categories in the UI but no getting any

using the API. 

Are there any ways we can retrieve product categories via API?

Thank you. Regards

Kevin

[Shopping API Forum Advisor Prod]

Hello Kevin,

 

I’m James, I work along with Lakshmi. Thank you for your response.

 

The API should return the product categories whether you set the value of the product category or it is auto generated by the merchant center backend.

 

To retrieve the product categories via API, you can use the products.list method under googleProductCategory field. Based on our documentation, the products.list allows you to view the list of all products within your merchant center account. If you already used this method to retrieve the googleProductCategoy but you were not able to retrieve the value of it, then please provide the complete API request and response logs in JSON format so we can look into it.

 

On the other hand, regarding website crawling feature you reach out to the merchant center support team as they are more knowledgeable with this feature. You can contact the merchant support team through this contact us form or by 'Help center and support' option under the 'Help' button of your merchant center account.

 

Regards,

James Howell Abarsoza

Content API for Shopping Team

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[Shopping API Forum Advisor Prod]

Hello Kevin,

 

I want to clarify my answer on my previous email.

 

I confirmed that  your understanding is correct, that the API only returns product categories if its value has been supplied by the merchant as referred to this documentation. That said, it is not possible to retrieve the googleProductCategory with the auto generated value via API.

 

Let me know if you have further questions on this.

 

Regards,

 

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[Shin]

Hi James

Thank you very much for clarifying, and btw, there is the screenshot of the curl result for fetching one product from the API.

It confirmed that the google auto generated categories are not retrievable.

So now, back to my question earlier:

 This will become a major bug/discrepancies, if merchants can see the auto assigned product categories in the UI but no getting any

using the API.

This does affect a lot of our clients currently. 

Do you have any plan addressing this issue sooner?

Thank you very much

Kevin

[Shopping API Forum Advisor Prod]

Hello Kevin,

 

Thank you for your reply.

 

Let me raise this to the rest of the team so we can have a deeper analysis on this and if this feature would be possible through Content API. Rest assured that we will keep you posted. You may also follow our blog for the latest updates on the API.