WooCommerce – How to Merge Product Categories by Keyword

Hey there! In this tutorial, we want to share with you the best way to merge your product categories. For example, if you sell books in WooCommerce, you may have several book categories.

We have these categories:

• Historical books
• Religious books
• Creative books
• Philosophy books
• Novel books

We want to merge them into a category called “Books”. Of course, it’s impossible in WooCommerce. But we have a great solution.

We’ll do it using the Taxonomy Terms Spreadsheet plugin. It allows you to edit your taxonomies in a spreadsheet.

You can apply changes to any field as you do in Excel or Google Sheets, or you can apply bulk changes in seconds using the “Bulk Edit” tool.

Also, it contains an advanced “Search” tool and a “Merge Terms” tool to help you save a lot of time.

Once installed and activated, follow these simple steps.

1- Open the categories spreadsheet

Go to WP Sheet Editor > Edit categories, tags, attributes, taxonomies.

You need to click on “Edit Product Categories” to open the categories spreadsheet.

2- Open the “Merge Terms” tool

Just click on “Merge Terms” on the toolbar.

3- Search your categories by keyword

You need to open the search tool by selecting “Select all the items from a search”. This will open a “Search” tool to help you filter your categories.

In this case, we’ll search for all the categories containing the “Books” keyword. Just enter it in “Contains keyword” and click on “Run search”.

4- Merge the selected categories

Once the categories are filtered, you’ll be taken back to the “Merge Terms” tool. You just need to select these values to merge the filtered categories:

• Replace these items: Select all items from a search
• With this term: Select the category into which you want to combine the selected categories. In this case, select the “Books” category.
• I understand it will remove all the terms from my search and keep the term selected above: Mark this checkbox.
• Click on “Execute”

Done!

After these simple steps, all the categories you selected will be merged into one. It’s really simple to manage thousands of taxonomies with the Taxonomy Terms Spreadsheet plugin.