Question:
How can I correctly assign multiple categories (collections) to a product via CSV without creating duplicates or junk categories?
Product:
Wix Studio / Wix Store CSV Import
What are you trying to achieve:
We want to automatically assign multiple categories to each product during CSV import — for example:
Brand (e.g. Dr. Medion)
Region (e.g. J-Beauty)
Product type (e.g. Serums)
Main menu section (e.g. Skincare)
This is essential for our product filters and navigation menus to work properly.
What have you already tried:
Adding multiple categories in the collection field (comma-separated) → creates invalid categories like Brand, Skincare, Serums
Duplicating rows → creates multiple products in the storefront
Re-importing with the same handleId or sku → does not update existing categories
Custom handleId logic and scripts
Filtering and cleaning data by type, brand, origin
Additional information:
[ We now have 700+ broken categories in our Wix panel due to test imports — but there’s no way to bulk-delete them, and removing each manually is not feasible.
We’d love to know:
Is there an official or recommended way to assign multiple categories to one product?
Is there a way to clean up categories via API or internal tools?
Happy to share examples of our CSV files or automation if needed.
To assign multiple categories to a product, you need to use a semi-colon ( ; ) as described in the support article (without spaces as well so it should be “Dr. Medion;J-Beauty’Serums;Skincare” for example).
Once I updated it back to the default with the semi-colon, I re-imported the items and if you don’t change the handleID, it should import as existing products.
I don’t have experience with it and I was trying to use it to find and delete all empty collection but there is a function to delete a collection in the Velo API that you or a developer can look into or perhaps others in the community can provide more insight (which I’d love to hear as well not knowing this function).
Thank you so much for your detailed response and support!
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to achieve the desired result. We did try uploading the CSV files — they were accepted successfully, but our main goal was for the system to automatically assign the products to categories based on the data in the file. Sadly, that didn’t work as expected.
It’s possible that the issue lies in the large number of categories we’re working with — maybe the system couldn’t handle the volume. We also had to manually delete some of the created categories, which took quite a bit of time.
In any case, we really appreciate your response and help! We’re also happy to share our own experience — including how we’re implementing artificial intelligence into our store’s workflow.
