ChannelEngine: how to manage economic operators

This article describes economic operators, how to retrieve them from the marketplace, and how to assign their IDs to the products.

Table of contents

Introduction

Create economic operators

Retrieve and map economic operators

Download economic operators

Export economic operators to the marketplace

• CSV file examples

Introduction

Economic operators are entities required by the Digital Services Act (DSA). They can be manufacturers, distributors, or importers of the product.

As a merchant on bol and TikTok Shop, you must assign an economic operator ID to each product you offer.

Create economic operators

Start by providing the required economic operator information in the back-end of the marketplace. For detailed instructions, check out bol's article Adding responsible economic operators within the EU and TikTok Shop's article Product listing safety and compliance requirements.

Retrieve and map economic operators

You can retrieve economic operators from the marketplace and assign economic operator IDs on ChannelEngine.

1. On ChannelEngine, go to the Mappings page of your marketplace. Select the Economic operators tab.
2. Click Schedule sync task to retrieve your available economic operator IDs from the marketplace.
3. Once retrieved, economic operators are presented in the form of a table. 
   
   • ID - the ID of the economic operator.
   • Name - the name of the economic operator.
   • Location - the registered address of the economic operator.
   • Email - the email address of the economic operator.
   • Phone - the phone number of the economic operator.
   • Status - the status of the economic operator (Valid or Invalid).
4. On the Offer mappings tab, map the Economic operator ID attribute to the corresponding ID. Use advanced rules to simplify the mapping process and assign multiple products to the same ID.

Download economic operators

Once you retrieve economic operators from the marketplace, you can download them as a CSV file. To do this, on the Economic operators tab, click Export.

The downloaded CSV file includes all economic operators currently stored on the marketplace, together with their IDs.

You can modify the downloaded CSV file and upload it back to ChannelEngine. Check out the next section to learn more about this.

Export economic operators

You can upload a CSV file that contains the economic operator data to ChannelEngine for export to the marketplace. Currently, this is only available on bol.

In the CSV file, you can:

• Update the existing economic operator details on ChannelEngine and the marketplace.
• Add new economic operator IDs on ChannelEngine and the marketplace.

Make sure the contact details are those of the manufacturer, and not your personal. Use a semicolon (;) as your delimiter. Make sure the text values you provide are enclosed in double quotes (“”). The columns are:

• Id - the ID of the economic operator. Leave empty for new economic operators.
• Name - the name of the economic operator. The maximum character count is 100.
• AdditionalAddressInfo - the optional address details. The maximum character count is 100.
• Street - the street name of the economic operator. The maximum character count is 100.
• City - the city of the economic operator. The maximum character count is 100.
• PostalCode - the postal code of the economic operator. The maximum character count is 100.
• HouseNumber - the house number of the economic operator. The maximum character count is 100.
• Country - the country of the economic operator. This must be a two-letter code of the country. E.g.: AT, BE, FR, IT, DE, NL, US.
• Email - the email of the economic operator. The maximum character count is 100.
• PhoneNumber - the phone number of the economic operator. The character count must be between 7 and 17 characters. Supported characters are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, ( ), and +.
• Action - the action to perform on the economic operator. The actions are:
  • SYNC - create or update the economic operator on the marketplace.
  • DELETE - remove the economic operator from the marketplace.

On the Economic operators tab, click Upload CSV and select your file from the file manager.

Once ChannelEngine uploads the data, it uses scheduled tasks to export the economic operator details to the marketplace and retrieve any updates from the marketplace. The synchronization status changes accordingly:

• In sync - the economic operator details are synchronized between ChannelEngine and the marketplace. The upload was successful.
• Pending - ChannelEngine has scheduled but not yet exported the economic operator details to the marketplace.
• Failed - ChannelEngine could not export the economic operator details due to an error. E.g.: the economic operator IDs on ChannelEngine did not match those on the marketplace.

CSV file examples

Creating an economic operator

"Id";"Name";"AdditionalAddressInfo";"Street";"City";"PostalCode";"HouseNumber";"Country";"Email";"PhoneNumber";"Action"
"";"ABC Logistics";"Suite 12";"Main Street";"Amsterdam";"1012AB";"50A";"NL";"info@abclogistics.com";"+31201234567";"SYNC"

Updating an economic operator

"Id";"Name";"AdditionalAddressInfo";"Street";"City";"PostalCode";"HouseNumber";"Country";"Email";"PhoneNumber";"Action"
"12345";"ABC Logistics";"Suite 12";"Main Street";"Amsterdam";"1012AB";"50A";"NL";"info@abclogistics.com";"+31201234567";"SYNC"

Deleting an economic operator

"Id";"Name";"AdditionalAddressInfo";"Street";"City";"PostalCode";"HouseNumber";"Country";"Email";"PhoneNumber";"Action"
"12345";"ABC Logistics";"Suite 12";"Main Street";"Amsterdam";"1012AB";"50A";"NL";"info@abclogistics.com";"+31201234567";"DELETE”