Configuring the Bol Repricer – Help Center - Channable

This is a Help Center article of Channable, the tool for product feed management and marketplace integrations. If you don't have an account yet, sign up for free or learn how to integrate your online shop with Bol.com. Looking for information on the Repricer? Learn how Channable can help you win the buy box with the repricer.

Note: This is a paid add-on. You need to add this add-on to your subscription yourself. To learn how to do so, read this article. After adding the add-on to your subscription, you can access the repricer settings you see below.

Important note on volume discount & commission reduction: As a general rule, the Repricer overrules the 'regular' volume discount and 'regular' commission reduction for all products included in your Repricer rules. Therefore, if you want to apply volume discount or commission reduction to products included in your Repricer you need to configure the Volume discount and commission reduction in the Repricer rules instead of the Build step. For more information about the volume discount, read this article and for the commission reduction, read this article.

Step 1 - Add the Bol.com Repricer to your subscription

As the Repricer is a paid add-on, you need to add it to your current subscription before you can access and set up the Repricer. This article explains how you can add this add-on to your subscription. The costs are €49 per Repricer per country.

Step 2 - Repricer settings

After adding the Repricer to your subscription, navigate to API's > [your Bol API], you can access the Repricer settings in the Settings tab.

Repricer country
To select the country market in the repricer, go to the repricer country setting and select The Netherlands or Belgium in the repricer country dropdown. You can only select one country. Choose the country for the repricer that matches the country in your product listing API. If your product listing API is connected to a Bol NL account, select the Netherlands in your country setting for the repricer. Failure to do so will cause the repricer to reprice against the wrong sellers. For example: If the API is connected to Bol NL, but the repricer is set to Belgium we will reprice the Bol NL offers against the sellers on Bol BE.

Repricer status
Here, you can select if you want the repricer to be active, inactive or on Dry-run. With the Dry-run status, you can preview all the price updates that the repricer would perform without actually implementing the price changes on Bol.com. When you are happy with your configuration and the previewed results, you can switch the repricer to active. The repricer updates will then be sent live to Bol.com.

Step 3 - Reprice Rules

In the Rules step of the Bol.com API, there is a separate tab for your Reprice rules:

Here, you can configure the parameters and strategy of the Repricer. Depending on the strategy, you can configure the following in a Reprice rule:

Reprice settings
Minimum/maximum price options
Do not compete with ('Competitor targeting' strategy only!)
Bol.com options
Conditions

1. Reprice settings

In the Reprice settings, part of a reprice rule, you can configure the following:

Rule name: The name that will show in the rule overview.
Strategy: Indicating which strategy you want to use for this rule. You can currently pick from the 'Buy box targeting' and 'Competitor targeting' strategies. If you want to know what these strategies mean, read this article.
Minimum price: This field indicates the lowest price the repricer can go to. You can select a field of your choice here, for example a 'minimum_price' field you have calculated in the general Rules section.
Maximum price: This field indicates the highest price you want to use.
IMPORTANT: We always try to undercut the price of the competitor with the lowest price offer. If the lowest price among the competing offers changes (i.e. because the competitor with the lowest price stops selling the product or increases his price), we will increase your price accordingly up to the value of your maximum price.
Price difference for undercut ('Competitor targeting' only): Here you can indicate the price difference used to undercut the competitors with a static amount.
- Note: if you use the 'Buy box targeting' strategy, the price difference to undercut is 10 cents. Because the Buy box strategy continuously undercuts the price in trying to get the buy box, this cannot be changed.
Wait time before price increase ('Buy box targeting with margin targeting mode' only): After you won the buy box, the repricer will start to increase the price once you have kept the buy box for a certain amount of time. It does this to try and win the buy box with the highest possible price. The default wat time is 72 hours, but you can change this time here. You can for example lower it if you want to aim for the highest price more aggressively. Note that increasing the price has a risk of losing the buy box. The value must be a whole number higher than 0 and lower than 505 hours.

2. Minimum/maximum price options

With these options, you can choose what happens in the repricer, either: 1) If there is no competition 2) If the price of the competition is below your minimum (competitor targeting), or 3) If the intended price update is below your minimum price (buy box targeting) The options are:

Go to standard price: The repricer will not reprice the item and the standard price will be sent.
Go to minimum: The repricer will use the minimum price set in the Reprice settings.
Go to maximum: The repricer will use the maximum price set in the Reprice settings.

(The image above is an example of the buy box targeting)

Specifically for the 'Competitor targeting' strategy, there is an extra option for the 'If competition is below your minimum':

Compete with next bestseller: The repricer will disregard the competitors that have too low prices for your minimum and will undercut the rest.

3. Do not compete with ('Competitor targeting' only)

If you use the 'Competitor targeting' strategy, you can configure parameters that indicate sellers you do not want to compete with. You can configure the following:

Sellers with a rating lower than: this field indicates that you do not want to compete with sellers who have a seller rating lower than the indicated rating.
Sellers with a delivery time longer than: this field indicates that you do not want to compete with sellers who have a delivery time that is longer than the indicated delivery time.
Sellers with a review count lower than: this field indicates that you do not want to compete with sellers who have fewer reviews than the indicated amount.
Specific sellers: here, you can also add specific individual sellers you do not want to compete with. You choose between 'Bol.com' and 'Seller'. If don't want to compete with a specific seller, you need to put in their Bol.com seller ID. This can be useful, for example, if you run a second seller account (i.e. a BE seller account) selling the same products.

In the example screenshot above, you will not compete with any sellers that have: a rating lower than 3.0, a delivery time longer than 4 days, or a review count lower than 8, and you will not compete with the specific sellers 'Bol.com' and Bol.com seller with ID '123456789'.

4. Bol.com options

Here you can select if you want to use one of the Bol.com specific options: Commission reduction or Volume discount. These two options can be found in the Build step of the regular Bol API as well, but the repricer will overrule those settings. Therefore, you also have the option to include them in your repricer rules.

For more information on using Commission reduction in the repricer, read this article.

For more information on using Volume discount in the repricer, read this article.

5. Conditions

In the last part of the Repricer rule, you can set certain conditions. This will influence which products are used for this specific rule. Setting these conditions works similary to how you would include or exclude products in the 'IF' condition in a regular rule.

By default, the repricer will include all products if you do not set any conditions. If you want to dynamically configure different repricer strategies, prices, or other parameters for certain groups of products, you can use multiple Repricer rules in which you include the relevant products (and exclude the rest).

Note: The rules will be executed from top to bottom similar to how the categorization rules work. If a product is included in your first Repricer rule, it will not be taken into account for the second Repricer rule even if the product meets the conditions in both rules.

Step 4 - Check the results

Individual items

When configuring the Reprice rules, you can check how a rule affects individual items. To do this, go to the desired Reprice rule, click on 'Save rule', and then on 'Selected items' on the right-hand side. You will see a list of all the items impacted by this rule. When you click on a single item, you will see the item overview including the Competitors, the Repricer settings, the 'Do not compete with' settings (in case you opted to use the 'Competitor targeting' strategy) for that product, and the event history:

The Competitors tab shows a list of prices of the different sellers on Bol.com (including you) and whether you compete with the seller in question or not.
The Reprice settings show how the Reprice rule configures the parameters for this specific product: the minimum and maximum price, the strategy, and the price difference for undercut.
The Do not compete with shows the parameters of sellers you do not want to compete with for this product (Competitor targeting only).
The Event history shows the price changes that happened for the product. When you click on 'info' you can find more information about the reason for the price change.

Note: Do you encounter the 'EAN is not known to Channable' error in the product preview? Please read this article for more information about this error.

Note on Errors in the Price preview: It can happen that there is an unusual amount of errors in the price preview that shows the buy-box status and competing prices per product. If this is the case and your project is currently running an export: please wait for the export to complete and check the errors again. They should be gone afterwards. If the high amount of error persists, please contact Channable support.

Repricer updates

You can also check what the Repricer updates will actually do in the Results step under 'Repricer updates'. In this overview, you will see all the most recent price changes triggered by the Repricer. There are also different statuses:

Dry Run: If you still have the Repricer status on Dry-run, the individual updates will also show this here.
Sent: This means that this price is sent to Bol.com.
Error: Channable encountered an error in sending the price update to Bol.com.

Dashboard overview

Another way to check the current repricer statistics is by navigating to Dashboard > Repricer. Here you can see an overview of the repricer statistics and you can also download this overview as CSV by clicking on 'Download as CSV'. If you have multiple repricers or you want a detailed overview, you can click on this repricer under channel and you will only see the statistics of this channel in a table. You can also download this overview by clicking 'Download as CSV'.

It is also possible to filter the items in the repricer previews (both the statistics preview and price rule preview), using one of the following filters:

No filter
Products with the buy box
Products without the buy box
Products that lost the buy box
Products that won the buy box
Products that are offline
Products with no data
Products with errors

Products with no data are the products that we don't have any repricer information about. This can, for example, be because the item is out of stock and therefore not live on Bol.com at the moment. Another reason could be that the product is not matched by any price rule and therefore not tracked by the repricer.

The 'Products with errors'-filter currently only supports the errors where the EAN of the product is not the same EAN that Bol.com uses. This means we cannot use the repricer on this product until you change the EAN to the one Bol.com uses. More information about this error can be found here.

A big advantage is that you can also see the "repricer price" in these previews, which will help you compare your own prices with the current repricer prices in the blink of an eye. This will help you optimize your repricer setup even further.

Note: It will take some time before all data will properly show after activating the repricer. It is possible that the updates will still be incomplete when you check them shortly after activating the repricer.

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