API documentation
The Catalog API is concerned with products available through the bol platform. In this API we provide a convenient way for affiliates to retrieve information about products such as name, descriptions, specifications, images, prices and delivery information. The API consists of several different endpoints.
Product Information by EAN
Basic Product Information
Products are sold either by bol or a retail partner on the bol platform. All products are provided with basic information such as their EAN, bol product ID, bol product URL and their GPC.
As also mentioned in Conventions, this endpoint also supports returning summaries of the offer, media, rating and others based on various include parameters. More detailed information can be found in the OpenAPI specification.
Offers
Products might have offers. Offers contain information such as price, delivery information, the product’s condition and much more.
If the product is unavailable to order, this endpoint will return a 404 and a body which explicitly mentions Unable to find offer for product {ean}.
Ratings
At bol we allow users to submit reviews of products. In our API we provide functionality to see a product’s rating out of five and also the distribution of that rating.
Categories
Products at bol are categorised in a tree-like structure. At the root of the tree there are broad categories such as books. These categories have subcategories such as children’s books or history books. These subcategories may contain their own subcategories and so on. We provide an API endpoint to access any given products category tree.
Variants
A product may have different variants, meaning a group of product with the same characteristics but having small differences. An example are socks, which are consists of similar but separate products with e.g. different colors or different sizes.
Example: given a black pair of socks in size L, the variants are a) all other non-black pair of socks for size L and b) all black pair of socks for other sizes than L.
Multiple Products
Search
With over 150 million products on the bol platform, it’s important to provide search functionality to our users and our affiliate’s users. We provide a search endpoint with all the necessary functionality to recreate the bol search experience or create your own. We provide functionality to refine search results allowing affiliates the ability to constrain search results to their domain.
Lists
Bol provides list functionality which provides affiliates with a quick and easy way to embed lists of products on their page. Similarly to the search endpoint, affiliates can provide parameters to the lists endpoint to only show products relevant to their users.
This endpoint is best suited for browsing products in a certain category as no search term has to be provided.