Understanding merchant categories

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](https://wildlink.me/data/[[APPLICATION_ID]]/merchant/1 "https://wildlink.me/data/[[APPLICATION_ID]]/merchant/1") and the merchant category tree JSON at: [https://wildlink.me/data/[[APPLICATION_ID]]/category/1](https://wildlink.me/data/[[APPLICATION_ID]]/category/1 "https://wildlink.me/data/[[APPLICATION_ID]]/category/1").

Example merchant JSON excerpt:

[
  {
    "ID": 7146,
    "Name": "Ecco Bella",
    "PaysNewCustomersOnly": false,
    "ShareAndEarnDisabled": false,
    "SERPInjectionDisabled": false,
    "BrowserExtensionDisabled": false,
    "Categories": [
      {
        "ID": 178,
        "Name": "Fragrance & Cologne",
        "ParentID": 221
      },
      {
        "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:

[
  {
    "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 16 Jun 2026