Understanding Marketplaces, Channels, and Sellers in Mirakl

A marketplace represents a retailer or merchant on the Mirakl platform. Some marketplaces may be divided into smaller entities to accommodate regional distinctions. For example, Leroy Merlin may have marketplaces for the EU, Brazil, and South Africa. These marketplaces form the foundational entities that the Activation system interacts with, where typically, each marketplace corresponds to a unique API endpoint with its own configurations.

A channel refers to a distribution segment within a marketplace, often used to represent different sales segments. While channels may represent regions, they can also be used for other segments like pricing strategies. For instance, the Leroy Merlin (EU) marketplace contains five channels: IT, FR, PT/ES, and two additional ones. The configuration of these channels and the association of sellers to them are managed entirely within Mirakl. We retrieve this data via API, without any control over its configuration.

A seller (also referred to as merchant) is equivalent to a client or customer on the Activation side of the system and is identified by a unique shopID.

Traditionally, each Activation client has one seller account on Mirakl, which serves as the link to their marketplace operations. For this setup, a client would have a single flow corresponding to a specific Mirakl marketplace. This setup looks something like this:

However, in some cases, a client may choose to operate multiple seller accounts within the same Mirakl marketplace. This approach might be used to segment regions or other business reasons (like pricing, brand catalog segmentation). Each seller account would then be linked to different channels within the marketplace. As each account requires separate authentication, multiple Activation channels must be created for these scenarios, and the configuration might look like this:

In these cases, requirement fetching is contextualized for each Activation Channel (i.e., for each seller). The distinction between Activation Channels is determined by the authentication and credentials used in the API call.

Product category marked as deleted by the marketplace?

Marketplace Data Model Updates

Marketplaces regularly update their requirements and category trees, which define product types, categories, and the corresponding required or optional attributes for each category. This could be due to merging catalogs or operational updates on the marketplace side. As a result, a new catalog and a new identifier would be created but the requirement schema would not change much. The frequency of these updates varies across marketplaces. Some MIRAKL-powered marketplaces update their data model weekly, whereas Amazon typically refreshes its templates every 6 to 12 months.

When a marketplace updates its requirements—handled at the channel catalog creation step—a previously available category or attribute may be removed or replaced with a new one. It’s important to regularly review these updates to ensure your product information remains aligned with the marketplace's requirements.

What to do when this happens?

If a product category is not available anymore, Activation willl soon display a message next to the existing catalog (referring to the deprecated category name).

Because it it impossible for Activation to determine what the new category should be, it cannot migrate your content automatically. Therefore, you must remap the catalog (as well as all related attributes) to one of the newly available product types.