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The Bol.com Repricer: The Buy Box Targeting strategy

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: The repricer is a paid add-on. You need to activate this add-on for 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.

When using the Bol.com Repricer in Channable, there are several Repricer strategies possible. There are currently two strategies to do this: Buy Box Targeting and Competitor Targeting. In this article, we explain how the Buy Box Targeting strategy works. If you want to read more general information about the Repricer first, go to this article. If you want to know how to configure the Repricer, read this article first.

The Buy Box Targeting strategy

The buy-box is the ‘buy-now’ button on Bol.com that places the product order directly with the seller/merchant that has the best offer for that product. Meaning that if you are offering this product and you don’t have the buy-box, the buyer has to specifically go to a list of other sellers and select you from that list. This is a manual action that many buyers may not ever consider, so it's a great disadvantage.

To get the best offer for the Buy Box, Bol.com makes a (secret) evaluation that involves:

  1. Offer price
  2. Delivery time
  3. Seller rating
  4. Stock levels
  5. And other factors…

Channable can only influence the price part of trying to get you the buy box. Other elements that will influence you getting the buy box are determined outside of Channable and are not adjustable using the Repricer. This is true for both available strategies.

If you want to always aim for the buy-box, Channable offers you this strategy: the Buy Box Targeting strategy. It checks if you have the best offer for each product for which the Repricer is correctly configured and tries to undercut the competition with 0.5% of the price if the price is higher than 20 euro, or 10 cents if the price is lower than 20 euro. After that, it evaluates if you have the best offer with the new price. If you do, the Repricer will stop lowering the price. If you don’t, it will keep lowering the price. This will continue until the minimum price threshold has been reached or you have the best offer on that product and, therefore, get the buy box.

By default, the Buy-box Targeting strategy will try to compete with everyone, regardless of their delivery time and/or seller rating. It is also not possible to set the amount the Repricer will undercut the competition with. If you want to set these boundaries you can use the Competitor Targeting strategy.

There are two modes for the buy box strategy for Bol.com: Prioritize buy box time and prioritize margins. The different modes are explained after the image.

Buy_box_strategy.png

Prioritize buy box time

The goal of this mode is: Get the buy box quick and keep it.

With the prioritize buy box time mode, the Repricer will increase the price in the following scenarios:

  1. An offer has the buy box for 3 weeks.
  2. The offer has the buy box upon introduction to the Repricer.

Prioritize margins

The goal of this mode is: Get the buy box with the highest price possible.

If you know that you have good ratings, delivery times, etc., you may want to consider this mode as you don't need to have the lowest price to win the buy box.

This mode does 2 things:

  1. It starts repricing from a different price point when an offer doesn't have the buy box. Instead of undercutting all competition, it starts at 110% of the current buy box winner. From that point, it decrements until the buy box has been won. So, if your competitor were to be selling something for 10 euros, your offer will be listed for 11 euros and the Repricer will lower that price with the amounts set out above, until you have the buy box.
  2. When an offer has the buy box for 72 hours OR an offer has the buy box upon introduction to the Repricer, the Repricer starts repricing upwards.

When does the Repricer increase my price?

With both strategies, the Repricer increases the price until:

  1. The buy box is lost.
  2. The maximum price set by the customer is reached.

In the case of the 'Prioritize buy box time' mode only:

  1. Until the price reaches the price of the next competitor.

Consequences
Using the 'Prioritize margins' mode may have some unintended consequences that you should take into account when choosing a mode.

  1. It may take longer to win the buy box because of the higher starting point.
  2. There is a risk of losing the buy box to a competitor because the price gets too high. In this case, we try to win it back right away by going back to the previous price.
  3. There is a higher risk of getting taken offline because Bol.com decided the price is too high for the market. It's important to take this into account when setting the maximum price.