Wildfire APIs
Understanding merchant categories

2min
Wildfire offers a JSON feed that provides a comprehensive merchant category tree. This article will describe how to navigate this tree to find the top-level categories. Additionally, we will explore how this category tree relates to our merchant JSON feed.
Each merchant in our feed is associated with one or more categories, including a primary category. To better understand this concept, let's look at an example of each JSON file.
For your application, you can find the merchant JSON file at https://wildlink.me/data/[[APPLICATION_ID]]/merchant/1 and the merchant category tree JSON at: https://wildlink.me/data/[[APPLICATION_ID]]/category/1.
Example merchant JSON excerpt:
JS
[
  {
    "ID": 7146,
    "Name": "Ecco Bella",
    "PaysNewCustomersOnly": false,
    "ShareAndEarnDisabled": false,
    "SERPInjectionDisabled": false,
    "BrowserExtensionDisabled": false,
    "Categories": [
      {
        "ID": 178,
        "Name": "Fragrance & Cologne",
        "ParentID": 22
      },
      {
        "ID": 22,
        "Name": "Health & Beauty",
        "ParentID": 0
      }
    ],
    "PrimaryCategoryID": 22,
    "URL": "http://www.eccobella.com/"
  },
...
[
  {
    "ID": 7146,
    "Name": "Ecco Bella",
    "PaysNewCustomersOnly": false,
    "ShareAndEarnDisabled": false,
    "SERPInjectionDisabled": false,
    "BrowserExtensionDisabled": false,
    "Categories": [
      {
        "ID": 178,
        "Name": "Fragrance & Cologne",
        "ParentID": 22
      },
      {
        "ID": 22,
        "Name": "Health & Beauty",
        "ParentID": 0
      }
    ],
    "PrimaryCategoryID": 22,
    "URL": "http://www.eccobella.com/"
  },
...
﻿
In this excerpt, we can see that the merchant named Ecco Bella has two categories: Fragrance & Cologne and also Health & Beauty. Additionally, we can see that it has a primary category of 22, which is Health & Beauty.
Example merchant category JSON excerpt:
JS
[
  {
    "ID": 1,
    "Name": "Clothing & Apparel",
    "ParentID": 0
  },
  {
    "ID": 44,
    "Name": "Baby & Kids",
    "ParentID": 1
  },
  ...
[
  {
    "ID": 1,
    "Name": "Clothing & Apparel",
    "ParentID": 0
  },
  {
    "ID": 44,
    "Name": "Baby & Kids",
    "ParentID": 1
  },
  ...
﻿
In this example, we can see that Baby & Kids is a child category of Clothing & Apparel. If we wanted to get all top-level categories, we would select every category that has a ParentID equal to 0 (which indicates it has no parent category).
Updated 12 Dec 2023
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