Category Mapping

Your store organises products in whatever way suits you — perhaps "Kitchen > Coffee". A marketplace, however, has its own fixed taxonomy of thousands of categories, each identified by its own code. Amazon, Kaufland, Allegro, bol.com and eMAG all use different trees, and none of them match yours or each other. To list a product, you have to tell each marketplace which of its categories your product belongs in.

This is not cosmetic. The category you choose decides which attributes the marketplace will demand (a "Coffee Grinder" category may require wattage and capacity fields that "Kitchen Accessories" does not), which on-site filters your product can appear under, the commission rate that applies, and where the product surfaces when buyers browse. Map to the wrong node and the listing may be rejected for missing required attributes, hidden from the relevant filters, or simply placed where no buyer looks.

Mapping is typically built as a translation table: each category in your source catalogue is paired with the corresponding category ID in each destination marketplace. Once that pairing exists, every product in your "Kitchen > Coffee" category is automatically classified into the right marketplace category on export, so you do not re-decide it product by product.

Because taxonomies are large and change over time, mapping is an ongoing task. Marketplaces add, rename, and retire categories; new product lines need new mappings; and the most specific correct category usually performs better than a vague parent. Multichannel tools speed this up by suggesting likely matches and storing the mapping per channel, but a human still needs to confirm that the specific category and its required attributes are right.