Product categories in MultiMerch
MultiMerch supports two types of categories – global marketplace categories and individual seller categories.
Marketplace categories are global marketplace-wide categories that are managed by the marketplace staff and usually appear in the main navigation area of the marketplace.
Seller categories are categories specific to each individual seller and only appear inside seller's store pages – this makes it easier for sellers to manage their product catalogs and help customers browse product catalogs of individual sellers.
Each product can belong to multiple global and seller categories and you as the marketplace owner can decide whether to allow sellers create their own categories and to list their products in the global marketplace categories.
Category management for sellers
If seller categories are enabled in MultiMerch, sellers will be able to manage their own category structure by accessing the Category management page via the Products selector.
Here, sellers can create new categories and manage the existing category tree.
Once a category structure is created, sellers will be able to list products into the new categories.
If both marketplace categories and seller categories are enabled, sellers will be able to list products into both category types at once.
Category settings
You can configure how categories will work in your marketplace by going to the Admin > MultiMerch > Settings > Product publishing section.
There are three different settings that control categories – Enable seller categories, Allow multiple categories and the Marketplace categories field in Product fields.
The first two control whether sellers will be able to create their own categories and list into multiple categories while the latter allows sellers to list products into marketplace categories.
Once the categories are set up, your marketplace staff can view and manage them via Admin > MultiMerch > Marketplace > Categories.
Here, MultiMerch lets the marketplace staff manage both the global marketplace categories and the individual seller categories.