Mapping Site Categories to Marketplace Categories in miniShop2 Feeds

Marketplace exports rarely accept a store’s internal taxonomy exactly as it is. The core case here asked a straightforward but important question: when generating a product feed, can the site category be replaced with a marketplace-specific category defined manually?

The answer matters because external marketplaces often impose their own naming and grouping rules. If you export your website structure directly, you may end up with a valid feed that is still semantically wrong for the target platform.

The better way to think about it

• Your site category tree is editorial structure.
• The marketplace category is export metadata.
• The two should be mapped, not assumed to be identical.

In practice, that usually means introducing an explicit mapping layer: a field, table, or export rule that translates internal categories into the taxonomy expected by the marketplace.

This is a useful ecosystem note because it captures an ecommerce integration lesson that applies well beyond one specific feed implementation.

Source: miniShop2 documentation and miniShop2 on GitHub.