Categories

Every Mirakl marketplace has its own category tree — typically thousands of categories, organised by industry, department and product type. Before a product from your shop can appear on the marketplace, the plugin needs to know which marketplace category it belongs to. That is what category mapping does: it pairs each of your Shopware categories with the corresponding marketplace category.

The mapping is marketplace-first: you open a marketplace category and attach one or more of your Shopware categories to it. The same Shopware category can be linked to only one marketplace category per connection, but a single marketplace category can collect several Shopware categories. On different connections, the same Shopware category may point to different marketplace categories — useful when you sell on more than one operator.

Where to find it

Open the Mirakl admin module, then on the dashboard click the Categories tile in the Quick Start section. The full list of marketplace categories appears with the following columns:

Code — the marketplace’s internal category identifier.
Name — the category label as the marketplace published it.
Full Path — the breadcrumb from the root down to this category.
Level — how deep the category is in the tree (1 = top level).
Parent Code — the code of the category one level up.
Active — whether the category is offered in the selection dropdowns when mapping (see Bulk Edit below).
Connections — which of your configured connections list this category.

You can search the list by Name and filter by Connection.

Refresh the marketplace tree

Before you start mapping, make sure your local copy of the marketplace’s categories is up to date. Click Refresh Mirakl Categories in the toolbar. The plugin downloads the operator’s current tree in the background and adds anything new — existing categories you have already mapped are left alone. Run this whenever the operator announces a new range of categories.

You do not need to refresh during the initial connection setup — the setup wizard does it for you at step 2.

Map a marketplace category to a Shopware category

Click a marketplace category row in the list. The Category Details page opens with two tabs: Overview and Mapping.
Switch to the Mapping tab.
At the top, pick a connection in the Connection field (preselected if only one is configured). The card below lists every Shopware category already attached to this marketplace category on that connection.
Click Add Category in the card toolbar. A dialog opens with a Shopware Category picker that shows the full breadcrumb under each option.
Pick the Shopware category and click Add Category again to confirm. The link is saved immediately and applies to every product in that Shopware category.
Repeat to attach more Shopware categories to the same marketplace category.

To remove a link, use the row’s context menu in the mapped-categories list and choose Remove.

Quickly enable or disable many categories at once

The marketplace’s full tree may contain thousands of categories — most of which you will never sell into. To make the picker easier to use, you can hide unused categories from selection dropdowns.

Click Bulk Edit in the toolbar. A dialog lets you flip the Active flag for the whole list, with an exception list:

Activate all, except selected — useful when most operator categories are sellable for you. Tick the few exceptions and apply.
Deactivate all, except selected — useful when only a handful are sellable. Tick the categories you do sell and apply.

Active categories show up in the Shopware-category picker (in the Add Category dialog and on the product edit page). Inactive ones disappear from those pickers but remain on the Categories list itself, so you can always turn them back on later.

Bulk Edit does not touch any existing mapping — it only controls which categories appear in selection dialogs.

Per-product override

By default a product is exported under the marketplace category mapped to its Shopware category. If you need a single product to go somewhere else on the marketplace, you can override it on the product itself:

Open Catalogues → Products and select the product.
Switch to the Specifications tab.
Scroll to the Mirakl Marketplace section, added by this plugin.
For every configured connection you see a Mirakl Category field. Pick a category to override the inherited mapping, or leave it empty to keep the inheritance from the Shopware category.

The override is stored on the product. Different products in the same Shopware category can override to different marketplace categories, and the same product can have different overrides per connection.

The same section also lets you override the Offer State per connection — see Offer states.

What happens to existing products

A category mapping decides where a product will be exported the next time it is sent to Mirakl. It does not move products that are already on the marketplace into a new category — the marketplace keeps each existing product in the category it was originally sent to. Re-exporting a product will send it under its currently mapped category.

Inheritance

When you map a parent Shopware category, child categories are not picked up automatically. Each Shopware category that you want to sell from needs its own mapping. This is deliberate — operator trees rarely mirror your shop’s tree shape exactly, so picking each leaf prevents surprises.

There is no automatic suggestion engine for categories. If you want to skip the manual work for product attributes (a different concept), see the Attributes page, which has an Auto Map feature.

Tips & gotchas

Attributes — each marketplace category has its own required attributes
Catalog export — uses the category mapping at export time
Connections — refresh the marketplace tree per connection