Retailer overview

This guide is for retailers and intermediaries selling on the bol marketplace. It walks you through building a custom integration against the Retailer API. For the shared onboarding steps that apply to every integrator (choosing how to integrate, access, essentials, testing), start with the Welcome / getting started overview.

Base URL

The base URL for all Retailer API connections is https://api.bol.com/retailer.

Authentication

You need a bol retailer account to connect. See Authentication for credentials and the OAuth2 flow. If you integrate on behalf of retailers, see Intermediary authorization.

Developing your connection

You can automate the complete selling workflow: manage your products, offers, orders and shipments, retrieve and confirm cancellations, handle your returns, view your invoices, and print your shipping labels.

If you use Fulfillment by bol, you can manage that process through the corresponding Retailer API endpoints.

Before you start, make sure you understand the key concepts of our data model and the process flow of selling on bol, and that you follow our conventions.

Asynchronous processing

Much of our processing is asynchronous. After you create, for example, an offer or a shipment, use a process status request afterwards to confirm the process completed successfully.

Not a plug-and-play solution

While all efforts have been made to simplify and standardize our partner integrations, bear in mind that we do not offer a plug-and-play solution. There are several ways to connect to bol, but all require knowledge of software development and programming.

There are, however, several third-party plug-and-play solutions on the market which can be purchased or used on a subscription basis. We have listed a few of them on the website for retailers.

Testing and tools

  • Test your connection against the demo environment before going live — all endpoints are represented, except where the response is a PDF.

  • Use the Retailer API Postman collection to get started quickly. Update its environment with your own credentials; by default it points at the demo environment.

For every API’s reference, specs, Postman and release notes, see the API quick reference.