Connecting Bol.com and Shopify: keeping inventory and orders in sync

Sell the same product on Bol.com and in your Shopify store and you are really running two tills that know nothing about each other. As long as you are well stocked, that is fine. But the last unit is where it gets risky: if someone buys it on Bol.com while Shopify still shows one in stock, you have an order you cannot fulfil. That costs you a cancellation, a disappointed customer and, on Bol.com, a dent in your seller performance.

The problem is timing, not counts

Most stock problems do not come from not knowing how much you have, but from the two channels not being updated at the same moment. You change the count on one channel and forget the other, or you do it at the end of the day when something has already sold in between. Keeping stock by hand only works when your sales are low and predictable. Once things pick up, you are chasing the facts.

On top of that comes retyping orders. Every Bol.com order you put into Shopify by hand, or the other way round, is time spent and a chance for an error in the address, quantity or item.

One direction for each flow

The connector between Bol.com and Shopify solves this by giving each flow a fixed direction, so two systems never try to update the same thing at once.

• Orders land in Shopify. Every open Bol.com order automatically becomes a Shopify order. Lines are matched on EAN barcode, and a multi-item order becomes one order with multiple lines. So you run your whole sales operation from Shopify, without logging into the seller portal.
• Inventory goes back to Bol.com. Sell in Shopify and the new count goes straight to Bol.com, so you never sell the same last unit on two channels.
• Shipments go back to Bol.com. Fulfil the order in Shopify and the tracking goes to Bol.com right away. PostNL, DHL, DPD, GLS and UPS are recognised, so your customer gets the right status update without you retyping anything.
• Returns and invoice requests come to you. New return requests show up in your overview, where you approve or reject them. Business buyers asking for an invoice land in a separate list, so no request slips through.

Because each flow runs only one way, it stays clear. Inventory has a single source of truth, orders arrive in one place and shipments leave from one place.

What you need

This connector runs as an app inside your own Shopify store. You install Schakel with an install link and sign in through Shopify, so you need no separate account. You then connect your Bol.com account with an API key from your seller account, which is stored encrypted.

The main condition on the product side is that your Shopify variants have an EAN barcode, because products are matched on it automatically. Anything that does not match automatically, such as a product without an EAN, you map yourself in a single screen. That mapping is remembered afterwards, so it is a one-off task.

A few practical points

• Does this work with Bol.com Belgium? Yes. Bol.com uses one seller account for the Netherlands and Belgium, so both run through the same connector.
• Does anything change for my existing Shopify orders? No. Schakel only creates new orders and never touches your existing ones.
• Can I connect several Bol.com accounts? Yes, you can attach several Bol.com accounts to one Shopify store.

Getting started

Once you sell the same products on two channels, synced stock is not a luxury but the way to avoid cancellations. To see exactly what travels between Bol.com and Shopify and how often, look at the Bol.com to Shopify connector. You can try it for thirty days, unlimited, no card required.