Keep in mind that if you change something in one place there might be other places where such a change must also be made, such as product names in the tables that store completed orders.
However, I submit that if one has really really long product and category names, one will probably have navigation problems on their site and may be putting too much detail in the product name ... which should be put elsewhere instead.
Too often people stuff their product name with excessive keywords, which is annoying to customers and results in being flagged as spam-like. Just be sure you're really doing it for the customer's benefit ... otherwise you might actually be making things harder on your customers, and thus resulting in fewer sales.
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