The Hidden Headache of Managing Categories and Products in WooCommerce (and How AI Can Help, If You’re Careful)
It’s easy to underestimate just how painful product and category management becomes as your eCommerce catalog scales. If you're working with WooCommerce, you know the plugin ecosystem can help with a lot—but it won't save you from the chaos that hits once your product count creeps into the thousands and your category tree starts to look like something out of a biology textbook.
At MMDB Solutions, we’ve worked with clients onboarding tens of thousands of SKUs from multiple distributors. Some are importing weekly updates. Others are managing custom catalogs or niche product lines where mapping the right category is more of an art than a science. Across all these setups, the challenge isn’t just getting data in the system. It’s getting usable data into a structure that makes sense to customers and search engines.
Problem 1: The Category Creep
Let’s say you start with a clean set of 50 categories. You onboard a new distributor, and now you’ve got 200 new categories that almost match your existing ones. Suddenly you have redundant categories like "Hand Towels," "Towels - Hand," and "Hand Towels & Dispensers."
You might be tempted to merge everything manually or write custom import logic, but that takes time, domain knowledge, and consistency across staff. And if your categories are already being used for Google Shopping feeds, SEO metadata, and customer navigation, it gets even messier.
Problem 2: Product-Categorization Hell
Mapping thousands of products to categories sounds straightforward until you realize:
Distributors label things inconsistently.
Product metadata is missing or misleading.
The same product could logically appear in 3-5 different customer-facing categories.
You end up writing SQL scripts like this:
UPDATE wp_term_relationships tr
JOIN wp_posts p ON tr.object_id = p.ID
SET tr.term_taxonomy_id = 305
WHERE p.post_title LIKE '%recycled%' AND p.post_content LIKE '%copy paper%';
This helps, but it doesn’t scale well. And you’ll always hit edge cases where the title says one thing, the description says another, and a human needs to decide.
Where AI Enters the Picture
AI tools can help. We've started using category classification models trained on existing catalog data to auto-map incoming SKUs. We also use LLMs to write draft product descriptions, assign SEO titles, and suggest canonical categories. In theory, this speeds everything up.
But here’s the catch: most out-of-the-box AI tools generate garbage. The category suggestions are overly generic. The product copy sounds like it was written by an overenthusiastic intern who’s never seen a mop bucket. And worst of all, these tools often reinforce existing inconsistencies instead of cleaning them up.
We tested some well-known low-cost AI content generators. The results were often unusable:
Suggested categories that didn’t exist in our catalog
Metadata stuffed with generic keywords and no real insight
Product titles that sounded vaguely right but were legally inaccurate
What Actually Works
For AI to help here, it needs:
A high-quality base taxonomy or category tree
A feedback loop where humans review, correct, and retrain the model
Tight integration with your existing WooCommerce import logic
In one recent case, we helped a client consolidate 7,000 products across 5 distributors into a single hierarchy. We used a combination of SQL rule sets, a fine-tuned GPT model trained on their past categorizations, and manual overrides through a review dashboard. It took weeks—not hours—but it saved hundreds of hours over the long term.
Final Thought: AI Isn’t a Magic Fix
The temptation to plug in an AI tool and walk away is strong. But in product and category management, the AI has to understand your specific business logic, your customer expectations, and the quirks of your vendors. Most generic tools don’t. You’ll either need to pay for more robust AI platforms or work with someone who can fine-tune a model to your exact needs.
WooCommerce can handle a lot. But if you’re dealing with thousands of products and evolving categories, you need more than a few import plugins. You need smart automation, good process design, and AI tools you actually trust.
And if you don’t have all that yet—you’re not alone. We’re still building those systems, too.