Categories and mapping

Your own category folders, the marketplace taxonomies that dictate required fields, and how products get mapped from one to the other.

There are two category trees in play, and they are not the same thing.

Your categories

Your own folder structure, imported from your category feed or built in the app. It exists for your convenience: organising the catalog, and hanging rules and defaults off a folder so everything filed under it inherits them.

Your categories are never sent to a marketplace.

Marketplace categories and product types

Each marketplace maintains its own taxonomy, and each node in it dictates which fields a listing must carry. Amazon calls these product types; eBay calls them categories. MarketplaceHub imports them per marketplace and per country — Amazon UK and Amazon DE are separate taxonomies with different required fields.

A listing cannot be published until it is filed under a marketplace category, because until then there is no way to know which fields are required.

Mapping between them

Getting from your category to the marketplace's is the job of the AI Import: it matches each product to a marketplace category and extracts the attributes that category requires, then puts anything it is not confident about into a review queue.

Two shortcuts avoid that work entirely:

• Same-source imports skip it. When products are pulled from a marketplace that already filed them — importing from your Etsy shop, say — the source category rides along with the row. If the destination is the same platform and country, the existing classification is reused and no AI credits are spent.
• Folder rules. A rule on one of your category folders can assign the marketplace category for everything filed under it.

The step-by-step of reviewing and correcting AI classifications is a Help Center topic — this page is about what the two trees are and why both exist.