TABLE OF CONTENTS

Omnivore Category Mapping: A Beginner’s Guide for Retailers


If you’re new to Omnivore, understanding category mapping is key to making sure your products appear in the right places on marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, or Kogan. This guide explains it in simple terms.


What is Category Mapping?


Category mapping in Omnivore is how you assign your products to the correct marketplace category. Each marketplace has its own set of categories, and mapping ensures that your products show up where buyers expect to find them.


    Why it matters:


  • Correct categories improve visibility and sales.
  • Misclassified products may not appear in searches, hurting your performance.
  • Products that are not mapped cannot be listed.


How Category Mapping Works

  1. Choose How to Map Products
    You can map products either:

    • Individually: Map one product at a time to a specific marketplace category.

    • By Retailer Category: Map multiple products in a retailer website category to a marketplace category.

  2. Follow the Order of Rules
    Omnivore applies mapping rules from most specific to least specific:

    • Individual product mapping overrides retailer category mapping.

    • Retailer category mapping applies if no individual product rule exists.

  3. Avoid Broad Promotional Categories
    Don’t assign products to generic or promotional categories unless necessary—they can reduce listing accuracy and discoverability.


On the Category Mapping Page

  1. Map By heading - choices are to map by Product to assign at the product level or map by Category to map at the category level.  Mapping at category level uses Retailer Category to Marketplace Category.
  2. Retailer Categories column -  The website category you have assigned the product to imported from your eCommerce store
  3. Suggested Categories columns - Suggested listing categories based on keywords from your product title. Not all marketplaces support suggested categories so these columns may be blank. You can choose whether or not to accept the suggestions.
  4. Choose Category button - Click this button if you want to manually choose a category from the Marketplace Category tree 
  5. Ignore Toggle - Toggle to green (on) if you want to ignore a Retailer Category for the purposes of assigning categories


When Product is selected and you are mapping by Product the screens will display as shown below


When Category is selected and you are mapping by Category (Your Category to Marketplace Category) the screen will display and show as below.



General Guidelines

  • You only need to assign categories to your products ONCE. You don't need to do it again unless you want to change the category.
  • You should ONLY choose ONE marketplace category for a product.
  • If you have blocked products from a marketplace, they are not included in the list of products that require a category. If you unblock the products, then they will then require a category if you want them listed on a marketplace.



Options for assigning a category to products

  1. Assign a marketplace category to all products in a retailer category
    1. This is the quickest option if your retailer categories are well aligned with the marketplace category. For example, if your retailer category from your eCommerce store is Food Processors you can assign the eBay category 'Food Processors' so that ALL products from your retailer category are listed there.
    2. This DOES NOT WORK if your retailer categories are NOT well aligned to the marketplace category. For example, if your retailer category is 'blenders' and it contains a broad variety of products including food processors, stick blenders, handheld blenders, then there is not a corresponding category on eBay that matches it. You should then assign categories to individual products.
    3. Create mapping rules - when you add new products to a category in your eCommerce store and a marketplace category has been assigned in our system we will import the new product and assign the category automatically so that the new product lists on the Marketplace.
  2. Assign a marketplace category to a product(s)
    1. If your retailer categories do not match marketplace categories then you will need to assign categories to individual products.



How Category Mapping Rules Are Applied

  • Order of rules: Omnivore applies mapping rules from most specific to least specific:

    1. Single product mapping (if you’ve set one).

    2. Website category mapping (if no single product mapping exists).

  • Multiple categories: If a product belongs to more than one website category and multiple categories have mapping rules, Omnivore will use the category with the fewest products. This is considered the “most specific” category.

  • Ignored categories: Any category marked as Ignored will be skipped and not used for mapping purposes.



Best Practise

  • Ignore all your promotional / generic type categories so that products are sitting in the best category.
  • Start by assigning Categories at the Retailer Category level as this is an easy way to do it in bulk.
  • Any products that can't be assigned at the Retailer Category level you will need to assign individually
  • If you’re not sure which category to assign to your products, do a search for the product or similar products on the marketplace and see which categories come up


Additional Helpful Information