Sales Channels

Sales channels define how your catalog is exposed to a concrete audience (storefront, headless client, feed, or app). Each channel carries defaults for language, currency, taxes, payment/shipping, domains, and navigation entry points so one Shopware instance can serve multiple “stores” without duplicating data.

What a sales channel controls

• Channel type: Storefront, headless Store API, product feed, or custom type.
• Audience defaults: language, currency, country, tax calculation mode, customer group, default payment/shipping methods.
• Navigation roots: navigation, footer, and service entry categories that drive storefront menus and listings.
• Presentation: home CMS page (homeCmsPageId with slot config) and storefront theme config for Storefront channels.
• Availability: which domains, payment/shipping methods, languages, currencies, and countries are allowed and which products are visible.

Core model and relations

• sales_channel: Holds defaults (language, currency, country, payment/shipping, tax calculation), navigation roots, home CMS page, access key, maintenance flags, hreflang config.
• sales_channel_domain: URL + language + currency + snippet set. Matched by host/path to build the sales channel context.
• sales_channel_translation: Localized channel names and home page fields.
• product_visibility: Per-channel visibility level for products. Required for products to appear.
• sales_channel_* mappings: Allow additional currencies, languages, countries, payment, and shipping methods beyond the defaults.
• cms_page: Optional home page layout with channel-specific slot configuration.

Domains and localization

Configure multiple domains per sales channel. Each domain pins language, currency, and snippet set (translations). Example:

• https://example.com/ → en-GB, GBP
• https://example.com/de → de-DE, EUR
• https://example.es/ → es-ES, EUR

hreflangActive and hreflangDefaultDomainId control hreflang links across these domains.

Navigation entry categories

Every sales channel defines three category entry points: navigation, footer, and service. Storefront menus are built from the children of those entries. Category listings under these roots merge explicit product assignments and, if configured, dynamic product streams.

Product availability per channel

Products must have a product_visibility row for each sales channel. Visibility values decide whether a product is searchable and/or directly accessible. A canonical category (main_category) can be set per product and sales channel for SEO-friendly URLs.

Context creation and Store API

Incoming requests resolve a sales channel by access key or matched domain. SalesChannelContextService builds a SalesChannelContext with the defaults above plus token, customer, rule-based pricing, and permissions. Store API routes such as /store-api/context, /store-api/navigation/{activeId}/{rootId}, and /store-api/category/{navigationId} use that context to filter data to the channel.

Extension points and events

• SalesChannelContextCreatedEvent: context built; use to enrich the context or persist session data.
• SalesChannelContextSwitchEvent: fired when /store-api/context switches currency, language, payment, shipping, or addresses.
• SalesChannelContextRestoredEvent: emitted when a stored context token is restored.
• Entity extensions: add custom fields or associations on sales_channel or mapping entities and expose them through Store API responses as needed.