bol.com: common errors

About this article

This article describes some of bol.com's most common errors, how to solve them, and where to find more information on them.

Table of contents

Missing product data

Please add a product category

Product not in offer export file

PRICE_NOT_COMPETITIVE

UNMATCHED_OFFER

Missing product data

For this product essential product information is missing.

bol.com has a set a minimum amount of product information you must provide them with. The kind of information, as well as its amount and how detailed it needs to be, depends on the product category.

There are two ways to publish your products on bol.com via ChannelEngine.

1. Match with an existing product - if the exact same product is already available on bol.com, you can match your offer with an existing product using its EAN. That is called offer matching. In that case, bol.com already has already been provided with the required product information by another seller – so you do not need to enrich the product data on ChannelEngine. When matching an existing offer, it is not necessary to complete the categorization and content mapping.
2. Create a product from scratch - if you are the first seller to list a product on bol.com, you must provide them with the minimum required amount of product information – which varies according to the product's category. If the required product information has not been provided, the article is not published. If you do not know what product information you are missing, check the Validation and feedback tab under the Listed products section – filtered on 'Not published'.
   If there is no validation and feedback available, go to the bol.com back-end, select My articles (Mijn aanbod, in Dutch), and filter on EAN. When matching an offer with an existing product, no validation and feedback is shown.
   

NB: you may be required to map attributes marked as optional under certain categories. To find out which optional attributes are needed, check out the Validation and feedback tab under the Listed products section.

Essential product information is missing - invalid data

The error can also occur when the data provided for an attribute is invalid. That is a common mistake when mapping attributes such as the product weight, height, material, etc.

In the screenshot above you can see an example of invalid data in the content mappings, which causes the error on bol.com. Those errors can be solved by adjusting the measurement unit provided. E.g.: kilograms to grams.

Please add a product category

Article rejected on bol.com because you didn't map all the required content fields.

Most of the time this error occurs because of products left uncategorized under the Categorization section. This error can also occur when required fields are not mapped under the Content mappings tab.

Check the Listed products section for validation messages, and map whatever unmapped attribute is left. If the reason for the product not being published is not listed under the Validation and feedback tab, check bol.com's back-end under the Mijn artikelen (My articles) section.

To fill out the correct product specifications and display them online, it is important to choose the right product group for your products. You can categorize them using one-to-one categorization. To catch exceptions, use categorization rules. For more information on this, check out the article ChannelEngine: categorization.

Product not in offer export file

That error occurs when a new product offer is exported, but it is not present in the status report ChannelEngine receives from bol.com every hour. The error resolves itself once ChannelEngine does receive the missing feedback, which in some cases may take up to two days.

PRICE_NOT_COMPETITIVE

When exporting products to bol.com, you might run across the error message PRICE_NOT_COMPETITIVE (Price too high). These products are not going to be published on bol.com, as the price deviates too much from what by bol.com determined as relevant market price (RMP).

To find out how bol.com determines this relevant RMP, consult the article Prijs en beleid (in Dutch) on bol.com.

Note that ChannelEngine has no influence on the RMP set by bol.com. If your offer is declined because of the pricing, the only solution is to lower it – unless the number of competitors drops, for example.

UNMATCHED_OFFER

After exporting your product offers to bol.com, ChannelEngine checks the status of the submitted data. One of the possible returning statuses is UNMATCHED_OFFER. There are three common errors that accompany this status:

• For this product, essential product information is missing. Go to Mijn aanbod (My offer) to enrich this product - the product with this EAN is known, but at least one required attribute is missing. Therefore, it cannot be published at this time.
• Unknown EAN code [EAN CODE] - the product with this EAN is not known at all, so no successful data export or manual creation has occurred.
• You are the first to sell this item on bol.com. Please add a product category - the product with this EAN is known, but an up-to-date product category is missing. This usually occurs when the product was created under a category that no longer exists, or if there was an issue when creating it.

Regardless of the description following the error, bol.com is stating that the offer cannot be created at the time of the last export. That could be fixed by filling the mapping gap and exporting product data for these products. Consult ChannelEngine: content mappings to check if your content exports to bol.com are set up correctly. This is not an instant process, it can take some time before the product information is created or updated.

Some of the common reasons for content not to be updated on bol.com are listed below:

• Incorrect values have been entered in the mapping - this happens with fields such as width and length, or other values expecting a numeric value. Make sure they contain only the value, without the unit of measurement (e.g.: no mm, cm, kg, etc.).
• Not all required fields have been mapped - go to Listed products, Validation and feedback, which lists the missing attributes for this product.
• Consider the waiting period - content updates on bol.com are not instantaneous. It takes time for data such as images and descriptions to be processed by all relevant systems. Wait 12-24 hours before following up with a content update on bol.com.
• You cannot update 'core products' - it is not possible to update attributes for products that bol.com consider as core. These are products that bol.com sells directly to customers, such as popular books.