On August 3, 2026, the Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets opened a public consultation on a draft decision involving Bol, the largest online marketplace in the Netherlands. The regulator had spent years investigating whether Bol gave itself and select partners an unfair advantage inside the purchase block, the mechanism that decides which seller a shopper sees first when several sellers list the same product. Bol has now offered a set of commitments to close the investigation: changes to how the purchase block works, new limits on how it uses seller data, wider access to its own promotional campaigns, and faster complaint handling. Read quickly, this looks like a compliance story about one Dutch retailer. Read carefully, it is a warning to every business that has let a marketplace algorithm become its system of record.

What Bol Actually Committed To Changing

The commitments Bol submitted to the ACM cover four areas, and each one says something uncomfortable about how marketplaces tend to operate by default, not only about how Bol operated. First, the purchase block. Investigators found instances where Bol displayed its own products, or products from certain favored partners, ahead of competing offerings that performed just as well or better. Bol has agreed to base placement strictly on measurable performance criteria and to be clearer about what those criteria are. Second, data. Every seller on Bol generates a stream of behavioral and sales data simply by operating on the platform, and the ACM concluded that Bol had been using that pooled data to strengthen its own retail position against the sellers who produced it. Bol must now stop that practice and give sellers more of their own performance data back. Third, promotions. Sales partners will be allowed to join Bol's own Select Deals campaigns under the same conditions Bol applies to itself, closing a gap that kept the best promotional placement largely in house. Fourth, service. Bol has committed to resolving complaints faster and displaying pricing more clearly for both shoppers and business sellers. None of this is final yet. The draft decision stayed open for public comment until September 13, 2026, and the full text is available on the ACM's own site ahead of a final ruling.

For sellers who spent the summer adjusting to Bol's new seller quality score, this is the second major rule change Bol has made to its seller relationship in a matter of months, and it will not be the last.

In the shipment data we see across the sellers who route their orders through Zineps, the pattern behind the ACM's finding is easy to recognize. Sellers who list on Bol alongside two or three other marketplaces routinely tell us they cannot explain a sudden dip in buy box visibility, because the only explanation available to them is whatever the marketplace's help center chooses to publish. A regulator with subpoena power needed years to get a straight answer out of one platform. An individual seller, with no such power, is left guessing.

Why This Should Worry Sellers Who Don't Even Sell On Bol

It is tempting to file this under Bol news and move on, particularly if your business sells through Amazon, Kaufland, MediaMarktSaturn, or nowhere but your own webshop. That would miss the point. A majority of European e-commerce revenue now moves through marketplaces, and nearly every one of them runs on the same basic architecture: a proprietary algorithm decides which seller wins the customer's attention, and the seller has almost no visibility into how that decision gets made. We have written before about how inconsistent delivery promises across marketplaces erode buyer trust, and the mechanism behind that problem is the same one the ACM just spent years investigating at Bol. What the regulator's findings confirm, in an official document rather than a seller forum thread, is something experienced marketplace operators have long suspected but rarely could prove: the rules of visibility can be quietly tilted for years before anyone outside the platform notices, and a seller's only real evidence that something changed is a slow, unexplained decline in orders.

The Data Ownership Blind Spot Regulators Just Confirmed

The part of the ACM's finding that deserves more attention than it has received is the data point, not only the purchase block point. A marketplace does not just rank your listings. It also collects your order volumes, your delivery performance, your return rates, and your customer complaint patterns, then feeds that data into decisions that affect your commission, your visibility, and, as the ACM found at Bol, potentially its own competing offers. Sellers who rely entirely on a marketplace's own dashboard for that information are trusting the platform to report accurately on a relationship in which it has a direct financial interest in the outcome. We have made a similar point about returns data specifically: sellers who only see the return metrics a marketplace chooses to surface are working from a picture that is, at best, incomplete and, at worst, shaped to the platform's advantage. The ACM's investigation gives that concern a regulatory basis it did not have before.

Three Moves Every Marketplace Seller Should Make Now

None of this requires waiting for the ACM's final decision, or hoping that every marketplace a business sells on eventually gets investigated too. There are concrete steps sellers can take today that reduce dependency on any single platform's internal reporting, regardless of how that platform's algorithm changes next.

Stop Treating the Marketplace Dashboard as Your System of Record

Every marketplace dashboard is, by design, an interface the platform controls. It shows what the platform decides to show, calculated the way the platform decides to calculate it, and updated on the platform's own schedule. Shipment data, carrier scan events, and delivery timestamps sourced directly from your carriers give you a record that does not depend on any single platform's willingness to share it, and does not change when that platform revises its algorithm or its reporting. The same logic applies to shipping rates: sellers who bring their own carrier contracts rather than relying entirely on a platform's built in rates keep control of their costs no matter how a marketplace's fee structure evolves.

Own Your Complaint and Delivery SLAs, Not Just the Platform's

Bol's commitment to faster complaint handling is a good outcome for shoppers, but it is still Bol's timeline, measured Bol's way, and reported when Bol chooses to report it. Sellers who track their own response times, delivery windows, and resolution rates across every channel they sell on can catch a service problem days before a marketplace's own metric flags it, and can prove, with their own data, that a delivery failure was the carrier's fault rather than theirs when a dispute happens.

Diversify Visibility, Not Just Sales Channels

Selling on multiple marketplaces is common advice, but it solves less than sellers assume if every channel still reports back through a different, fragmented dashboard. The businesses in the best position when a platform changes its rules, whether voluntarily or under regulatory pressure, are the ones that already have a single, carrier agnostic view of every shipment, return, and complaint across every channel they sell through, so a change on one platform becomes a data point instead of a blind spot. That single view is also what turns a regulatory story like this one into something actionable rather than something to simply read about: a seller who can already see, in their own system, how their buy box eligibility correlates with their own delivery data does not need to wait for a consultation period to know whether their operations hold up.

How Zineps Gives Sellers That Independent View

This is precisely the gap Zineps was built to close. As the operating system for shipments, Zineps sits above your marketplace accounts, your webshop, and every carrier you work with, pulling shipment, tracking, and exception data directly from the source rather than relying on what any single platform chooses to report. When a parcel is delayed, damaged, or stuck, Zineps surfaces it from the carrier's own data feed, often before a marketplace's internal metric would reflect it, giving your team the chance to resolve the issue and protect both the customer relationship and your standing on every platform you sell through. Sellers running operations across Bol, Amazon, and their own webshop use Zineps to build one delivery and complaint record that belongs to them, not to any single marketplace, which matters enormously the moment a platform's rules change, whether that change comes from a product manager or, as this year showed, from a regulator.

The Rules Will Keep Changing. Your Data Shouldn't Depend On Them.

The ACM's draft decision on Bol will not be the last time a European regulator scrutinizes how a marketplace treats the sellers who depend on it. Whatever the final ruling says once the consultation closes, the underlying lesson is already clear: the businesses that hold up best when platform rules shift are the ones that never let a single platform become their only source of truth. If your shipping and delivery data currently lives entirely inside marketplace dashboards you do not control, now is the moment to change that, not after the next investigation lands.

Explore how Zineps connects to every carrier and marketplace you sell through, and gives your team ownership of the data that decides your visibility, your margins, and your customer relationships.