A+ Content does not exist on bol.com: here is what does

A+ Content does not exist on bol.com, and that changes your whole content plan

If you are looking for A+ Content on bol.com, you are looking for something that is not there. bol has no module system on the item page. No comparison table, no hotspots, no carousel, no brand story block under your product information. The full content tree of the partner platform covers category, data model, title, item description, images, video, manuals, (E)CE marking, product families and bundles. There are no other places to put your brand.

That is not a detail. It means the A+ story you had built for Amazon cannot be copied over to bol. On Amazon you spread that story across fifteen module types with fixed grids. On bol the same story lands in one description, a set of images and a single video. Those are two different creative briefs, and anyone who buys them as one brief ends up shipping half work on one of the two platforms.

Most agencies write nothing about this. We went through the content pages on both platforms and counted: across the 2034 pages of the bol partner platform there is not a single page about modules, enriched content or an A+ style structure. On the Amazon side the limits are specified down to the character in their own open data model. Two platforms, two entirely different toolboxes, and one brand that has to feel the same on both.

Below you will find what each platform actually allows, where the hard limits sit, and how to split one brand story into two deliverables without watering either one down.

What can you actually put on a bol item page?

Less than you would expect, which is exactly why every element counts double. The bol content documentation splits your item page into a handful of fields: you pick a product category, you fill the data model with item attributes, you write a title and a description, you upload images and possibly a video, you attach manuals and (E)CE marking, and you link variants through product families and bundles. That is the entire toolbox.

Video is the sharpest example of how tight that is. In its own partner documentation bol states that it displays one video per item and shows the most recently uploaded video. Your video can therefore be overwritten by a video supplied later by someone else. On an item page where several parties sell the same EAN, that is not a theoretical risk.

The same principle applies to your images on a smaller scale. What sits spread across a series of modules on Amazon gets compressed on bol into an image set that has to explain itself. No captions under a module, no table next to a photo. The information has to live inside the image.

This scarcity is no reason to take bol less seriously. It is a reason to put different people on it. A good bol description is editorial work, not design work. A good A+ is design work on an editorial foundation. Our piece on optimising your bol.com listing covers how those fields work one by one; this article is about what you can and cannot carry over to the other platform.

What is not allowed in your bol content?

More than you are used to on Amazon, and with a heavier sanction. bol states explicitly that content is meant to inform the customer and that the rules are part of the policy points system. Break them and your seller account can receive a policy point deduction. The number of points depends on the severity and the extent. That is a different instrument from a rejected module: it hits your account, not just that one item.

The rules themselves are concrete. Referring to websites on an item page is strictly forbidden. Content may not refer to prices, because the price is already on the page. Claims about delivery or delivery time are out. Promoting an item for a specific holiday such as Father's Day or Black Friday is not allowed. And sales slogans are gone: while stocks last, the word cheap, buy one get one free. On top of that, vague sustainability terms such as environmentally friendly, eco, sustainable or climate neutral may not appear in the description; only a specific benefit is allowed, such as a concrete share of recycled material.

For brands coming from Amazon that takes adjusting. A lot of A+ copy leans on exactly those registers: urgency, season, a brand promise that is more feeling than fact. On bol you shift that energy into the imagery and into the product attributes. The description turns factual, the image set does the persuading.

In practice this means you need two texts, not a translation of one text. That is why our product listing design work includes a separate bol set as standard: a description that respects the rules, an image set that carries the arguments, and one video that explains the product instead of building atmosphere around it. What that image set looks like when your brand has to carry it is covered in why brands fail on marketplaces.

How tightly is Amazon A+ actually specified?

More tightly than most brands realise, and that is good news for your brief. Amazon publishes the A+ Content data model openly in the A+ Content API model on GitHub. It holds the limits the interface enforces, machine readable and without a login. It is the only place to read them up front, because the Seller Central help pages sit behind a login.

There are fifteen standard module types: logo, comparison table, four variations of image and text, a header with image and text, a sidebar, a text over image, a multiple image block, the product description, two single image variants, a technical specification table, a text block and a three panel layout. The comparison table allows a maximum of six product columns and ten metric rows, and the product title inside that table is capped at eighty characters. The technical specification table goes up to sixteen rows. A bulleted list inside a module stops at eight points. Alt text on an image runs to a hundred characters. A text field goes up to ten thousand characters. The status flow is DRAFT, SUBMITTED and then APPROVED or REJECTED.

One detail in that same model is strategically relevant. The badge list includes the value PREMIUM, yet there is no premium module type in the API at all. Premium A+ can therefore only be built through the interface: it cannot be automated, cannot be put under version control, cannot be rolled out across a catalogue with a single script. For a brand with dozens of variants that is a planning question, not a technical footnote.

What you gain is a brief that does not fall over. We write the copy for A+ Content against these limits, so a 90 character headline does not die halfway through the design. Clients supply exactly as much text as fits.

The 8% and the 20% come from a footnote with no date

Almost every Dutch page about A+ Content quotes the same number, and almost nobody quotes the footnote underneath it. On its own seller page Amazon writes that basic A+ content can increase sales by up to 8% and well implemented premium A+ content by up to 20%. The evidence behind that number is a single line: internal Amazon data. No date, no sample size, no control group, no split by category.

The sting sits in the comparison on that same page. Footnote two reads: internal Amazon data, August 2024. Footnote three points to Amazon's own brand protection report from 2024. So Amazon does date its sources, just not this one. Note the phrasing as well. "Up to" makes it a ceiling, not an average. And "well implemented" is a qualifier that is never defined, which lets any disappointing result be attributed to execution after the fact. It is the same construction as the widely quoted doubling claim about Brand Stores, which we took apart in the numbers behind the Amazon Brand Store.

No independent study confirms or refutes that number. The closest hard evidence is not about A+ Content but about richer, AI assisted content in the broad sense: randomised field experiments at a large cross border platform covering millions of users and products across seven workflows. The outcome was a sales effect ranging from no detectable impact to 16,3 percent, depending on how much the new approach added on top of what the company already did. And where there were gains, they came mostly through conversion rather than a larger basket.

That is the honest version: under real randomisation the lower bound of richer content is zero. Not because content does not work, but because the effect depends on what was already there. A catalogue with bare phone photos jumps forward. A listing that already holds up gains marginally. So we do not promise a percentage. We promise a structured A+ that hits the mechanisms that demonstrably work, and we advise brands to measure it themselves with the experiment function in their own seller account instead of sailing on a footnote.

The Brand Page Creator is bol's Brand Store, not bol's A+

When brands ask where bol does offer brand space, the answer is the Brand Page Creator. That is a separate brand page, not a layer on your item page. You choose from three templates: product visibility, brand visibility and basic. Then you supply the building blocks and submit the page for review.

The delivery specifications are fixed, and the full list sits below. What matters more than the individual dimensions is what they demand together: you supply a banner, a logo, a brand story image, two to six categories, a video, a product carousel and a featured item. You do not crop that out of existing material; it is a shoot of its own. bol states that review usually takes 5 to 10 working days, and because the tool is new it can run up to 10 working days in the early phase. A later change goes through that review again, unless you only adjust EANs.

One thing to place correctly: this is a campaign surface, not a product page surface. The bol brand page is fed by paid Branded Shelves and lives next to your items, not inside them. Treat it as a replacement for A+ Content and you are expecting conversion in a place where awareness gets built. What brand registration at bol actually gives you, and in what order to tackle this, is covered in building a brand on bol.

What does this mean for your advertising costs on bol?

More than it did before, as of this month. In a post dated 3 August bol writes that relevance now also plays a more direct role in setting the cost per click for Sponsored Products. As relevance factors bol explicitly names an attractive offer, strong product information, good reviews, suitable delivery conditions and precise targeting. Your bid still sets the maximum click price you are willing to pay, but the actual click price now moves with how relevant your ad is.

Put that next to the previous sections and the picture shifts. On bol your product information is no longer a purely organic lever. It is a direct line item on your media bill. A mediocre description and a weak image set cost you conversion first and a higher click price second, on exactly the same impression. Bad content gets paid for twice.

That changes the maths on a content refresh compared to last year. You used to weigh the cost of new photography against an expected lift in conversion. Now you weigh it against your advertising budget too, and for most marketplace brands that budget is the largest variable line. bol advises monitoring campaigns closely during the rollout, which is a sensible moment to lock in a baseline before you touch your content. Measure for a week first, then change, and the effect can be attributed to something.

The link between content and advertising costs is not unique to bol; we wrote earlier about how branding drives your advertising costs. What is new is that a platform now puts it into its bidding mechanics out loud.

Building one brand story for two platforms

Start with the story, not the format. In six years of Oase Creative we have shipped hundreds of listings on bol and Amazon, and the pattern is always the same: brands that line up their arguments first and only then look at the platform fields keep a consistent brand. Brands that improvise per platform end up with two different products.

In practice this works in three layers. The first layer is the argument set: the five to seven reasons someone buys this product, in order of weight, each with the evidence that it is true. That set is platform free. The second layer is imagery: a studio series where every argument can stand on its own, plus lifestyle where the product needs context. You shoot that series once, properly, and crop it per channel. The third layer is layout, and that is the only layer that differs per platform.

The trap sits in layer two. Imagery designed for an A+ module often carries text near the edge that drops out on bol or turns unreadable on a phone. Imagery made for bol is sometimes too bare for an Amazon module that has room to spare. So we design the image series with a safe zone, which keeps the same shot standing in both grids. That is exactly the subject of product content across channels, where we set out how to hold one source instead of three separate sets.

And the video: on bol you get one, so that one has to explain the product. Sell atmosphere on your own channels. At videography we cut a short explainer version alongside the brand film as standard, precisely because that platform field only has one slot.

How we approach this at Oase

When a brand comes to us with both channels, we deliberately split the track. Not because it is duplicate work, but because these are two different crafts standing on the same argument set. The A+ is a design job with fixed grids and character limits. The bol set is an editorial job with an image series that has to work without a text frame. Have the same person do both in the same afternoon and you get one good version and one derivative.

The order that works best for us: argument set and photography first, then bol, then Amazon. bol forces precision because you have so little room. That precision makes the A+ better afterwards, because the core has already been fought out. The other way round works less well: start with a full A+ and you will try to cram too much into the bol description and run into the rules.

Where we save the most time is up front. By using the limits from the Amazon model and the bol rules as the briefing document, clients supply the right amount of text and imagery in one round. No headline that gets cut off, no slogan that has to go, no second photo shoot because the format does not fit. For brands at the start of this, product listing design is the entry point; if you already have the imagery and it is purely about the Amazon side, A+ Content is the shorter route.

What we will not do is promise a percentage. Amazon's own number is a ceiling from an undated internal source, and the best independent research shows the effect of richer content can just as easily be zero when the starting point was already good. What we can do: put your current listing next to the hard platform limits, show which fields you leave empty, and fill them with material that holds up on both sides. That is measurable, and it is yours.