Summer is here, and for most people that means one thing: vacation. For Bol.com sellers, however, the prospect of a two-week trip can feel like a logistical nightmare. Who processes the orders? What happens if stock runs out? Will your seller rating survive the radio silence?
The good news: with the right automation in place, your Bol.com store can run itself while you’re sipping a drink by the pool. Here’s exactly how to set it up before you leave.
Why Summer Is Different for Bol.com Sellers
Before diving into the how, it helps to understand why summer is a particularly tricky season for online sellers.
First, demand doesn’t stop. Bol.com keeps selling whether you’re at your desk or at the beach. Customers still expect fast delivery, quick responses to questions, and smooth returns handling.
Second, staff is often reduced. If you have employees, they’re probably taking their own vacations too. That means less capacity at the exact moment you’re away.
Third, your seller rating is always watching. Bol.com tracks your performance continuously: on-time shipping rates, response times, cancellation percentages. A single week of poor performance can drag down a rating you’ve spent months building.
The solution is simple: automate everything you can before you leave, and make sure the systems can operate without you.
Step 1: Get Your Inventory in Perfect Shape
The worst thing that can happen while you’re away is running out of stock on a popular product and having to cancel orders. Not only does this frustrate customers, it directly hurts your seller metrics.
Before your vacation, do a full inventory review. Look at your sales velocity over the past 30 days and calculate how much stock you’ll need to cover your time away, plus a buffer of 20-30% for unexpected demand spikes.
If you sync your inventory with a WMS, webshop, or ERP system, make sure the connection is active and up to date. With Schakel’s inventory synchronization, your stock levels on Bol.com update automatically whenever they change in your source system. That means if a product sells on your webshop and you only have 3 left, Bol.com will reflect that immediately — preventing you from accidentally overselling while you’re away.
If you’re genuinely unsure about stock levels, consider temporarily pausing offers for products with low inventory rather than risking cancelled orders.
Step 2: Automate Order Processing and Shipping
Manual order processing is the biggest time sink for most Bol.com sellers. Without automation, someone has to log into the portal, download the orders, create shipping labels, and upload tracking codes — every single day.
Set this up to happen automatically before your vacation. Connect your order processing to your shipping carrier so that when an order comes in, a label is generated and tracking is uploaded to Bol.com without anyone touching a keyboard. Most modern shipping integrations support this.
Pay special attention to your handling time settings. Bol.com requires you to ship within your stated handling time. If your warehouse or carrier has different hours in July and August, update your lead time accordingly. It’s better to promise 2-day handling and deliver in 1 than to promise 1 day and miss it because your team is short-staffed.
Step 3: Set Up Holiday Mode (Correctly)
Bol.com offers a vacation or holiday mode that lets you temporarily suspend your listings. It sounds like the easy solution, but it comes with trade-offs.
When you activate holiday mode, your offers disappear from search results. That means no sales during your absence. If you’ve spent time building up listing visibility and buy box wins, you’re essentially pressing pause on all of that — and rebuilding momentum when you return takes time.
A better approach for most sellers: keep your store running with automated systems rather than shutting it down. Reserve holiday mode for situations where you genuinely cannot fulfill orders, such as if you operate a solo operation with no warehouse backup at all.
If you do use holiday mode, plan your return date conservatively. Coming back to hundreds of accumulated orders on day one is overwhelming and often leads to the exact performance problems you were trying to avoid.
Step 4: Prepare for Customer Messages
Bol.com measures your response time to customer messages. During vacation, if messages go unanswered for 48+ hours, your score takes a hit.
Options to handle this:
- Set up an auto-reply explaining you’re away and when you’ll be back. Bol.com allows this in your messaging settings.
- Delegate to a trusted person who can check messages every day or two and escalate anything urgent.
- Use a customer service tool that can handle common questions (order status, return requests) without manual input.
For straightforward questions like “where is my order?” — these can often be answered automatically if you have tracking information connected to your order system. Point customers to their track and trace link in your auto-reply template.
Step 5: Monitor Without Micromanaging
Even with solid automation, you’ll probably want to glance at your store once or twice during your vacation. That’s fine. But it should be a quick check, not a daily hour-long session.
The key metrics to monitor remotely are:
- Seller rating (overall score and individual components)
- Open orders — are they being processed without issues?
- Stock levels — any products approaching zero?
- Pending returns — any that need approval?
Set up alerts if your tools support it. Getting a notification if your seller rating drops below a threshold is much better than discovering a problem after two weeks when it’s already serious.
Step 6: Test Everything Before You Leave
This might sound obvious, but it’s the step most sellers skip: actually test your automation before your vacation.
A week before you leave, run through the complete order flow manually. Place a test order, check that it processes correctly, confirm that shipping is triggered automatically, and verify that tracking uploads to Bol.com. Check that your inventory sync is working by making a small change in your source system and confirming it reflects on Bol.com within a few minutes.
The time to discover that your automation has a configuration issue is not on day two of your holiday when you get a worried message from your business partner.
Coming Back Stronger
Here’s the thing about getting your store fully automated for vacation: the work you do to prepare doesn’t just pay off for two weeks. It pays off every week after that too.
Sellers who go through this process often discover they were doing a lot of unnecessary manual work that could have been automated months ago. Running a tight, automated operation isn’t just a vacation luxury — it’s how the most efficient Bol.com sellers build sustainable, scalable businesses year-round.
So yes, take the vacation. Set up the automation. And come back refreshed, with a store that’s been running smoothly the whole time.
Ready to automate your Bol.com operations before summer? Explore Schakel’s features or get in touch with our team to get everything set up in time.
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