How LifeGoods uses MarktMentor for revenue growth and competitor analysis on bol
Lars HurkmansCo-founder19 January 2024Reading time 4 minutes
LifeGoods, one of the largest sellers on bol with more than 500 products, uses MarktMentor for four things: ranking insights, insight into shipping and commission costs, profitability analysis per product category and competitor research through the Chrome extension. As a result, the team spends less time collecting data by hand and has more time left for analysis.LifeGoods, founded in 2016, was one of the first sellers to start on bol.com with its own product range. The company offers products under four brands: Auronic for electronics, KitchenBrothers for household appliances, TRVLMORE for travel products, and LifeGoods for general products. Since then, LifeGoods has grown into one of the largest and most successful sellers on bol.com, with more than 500 products. LifeGoods has also expanded its activities to Amazon and Albert Heijn. The company's growth led to a growing need for data to streamline business processes. For these insights, LifeGoods partnered with MarktMentor. In this case study, Patrick Verheij (Head of E-commerce & Customer Service) and Noah Schutten (Marketplace Manager) show how they use MarktMentor to optimise the work at LifeGoods.
Responding quickly to market changes with ranking insights
For a long time we struggled to get a clear overview of the findability of our product range. Initially we did this by hand, because there were no software tools that could track our positions. With hundreds of products in our range, this quickly became a huge job. When the first software providers started offering solutions, we decided to try them all to judge how well they worked. However, with several tools we noticed that the positions shown deviated significantly from our manual measurements.
Our frustration with this led to the decision to try MarktMentor. Comparing MarktMentor's data with our manual measurements showed that MarktMentor displayed the correct positions, which gave us confidence in the accuracy of its data.
Another advantage of MarktMentor is that you don't need to specify per product which keywords should be tracked; this happens automatically and retroactively. Our feedback helped MarktMentor give us the option to specify through bulk imports which keywords we wanted to see position insights for. This now allows us to quickly review the findability of our various products.
Since we started using MarktMentor, we no longer have to worry about collecting all keyword and category positions. Instead, we spend our time on analysis, which is also possible within MarktMentor. We can now review the rankings periodically and monitor them weekly. We can quickly identify which products are dropping in the rankings, so we know which products need more attention.
“Thanks to the fast and accurate ranking insights, we can respond better to changes in the market. As a result, we can spend more time on analysis instead of collecting the data needed to carry out that analysis.”
New insights into shipping and commission costs
Since we implemented MarktMentor in our daily work processes, we noticed that some shipping costs were higher than we had originally expected. Further analysis showed that this was due to a discrepancy between the stated and the actual dimensions of products, which resulted in the use of unnecessarily large shipping labels. Now that we are aware of this problem, we have products with deviating dimensions measured again, which results in lower shipping costs.
We also noticed that the actual commissions we pay to bol sometimes differed from the commissions we thought we were paying. This has given us new insights into the profitability of our product range.
Adequate insights into profitability
For us it is important to get a clear view of the profit margins of the products in our range. We aim to analyse the entire range as well as to distinguish between the profit margins of different product categories. This approach allows us to zoom in specifically on products that deviate, so we know which products need extra attention.
Before we used MarktMentor, we struggled with how to get this insight. Partly thanks to the feedback we were able to give MarktMentor, we can now view these insights clearly within MarktMentor. The export options are also important here, so we can integrate data outside of MarktMentor into our own systems.
Another important feature is the ability to view profit margins over different periods. This makes it possible to monitor the data at day, week and month level. This functionality gives us the means to manage our range effectively on a weekly and daily basis.
“MarktMentor's dashboards give us adequate insights that we can view for all the different periods. This allows us to optimise our products on a day-to-day basis.”
Competitor analysis with the Chrome extension
To understand how our range performs compared to the rest of the market, we use the MarktMentor Chrome extension. This extension lets us see estimates of the sales of products around our range. This information is essential for us to monitor competitors and to understand how our products compare to the products around us.