How do you make your first 1,000 euros in revenue on bol?
Lars HurkmansCo-founder11 March 2026Reading time 15 minutesYou make your first 1,000 euros in revenue on bol with a complete starter route: you register with the Chamber of Commerce (KVK), do market research based on data, choose a product with enough demand and manageable competition, source it, build a strong product page and, after launch, steer on your ranking, ads and your real profit.
In this case study we walk through the whole route together with Jasper Leeuwen. Jasper has been active in e-commerce for more than six years, started on Amazon and later moved to bol, and says he has coached well over a thousand sellers. Below you find every step from this article as text, from the first registration to optimising after launch. We are writing here for the starter who wants to build a private label brand on bol.
What do you arrange before you are allowed to sell on bol?
Before you can sell anything, you arrange the basics: a registration with the KVK, a legal form, a business bank account and your VAT registration. Start early, because the lead times keep running while you work on your market research.
For the legal form, a sole proprietorship (eenmanszaak) is the most obvious choice for most starters; a private limited company (bv) quickly brings start-up costs of around a thousand euros. If you are doing it with someone else, a general partnership (vof) is an option. With a sole proprietorship or vof you can be held personally liable if something goes wrong with your product. If that worries you, you can limit that risk with product liability insurance.
Apply for your business bank account as soon as your KVK registration is in, because banks are not the fastest. If you will later sell above a threshold amount in Belgium, you file your VAT via the OSS registration; you can arrange that in advance. This is not financial advice, but a business credit card can help with your cash flow later on.
Watch one hard condition: bol uses the guideline that you must have been registered with the KVK for at least ten weeks before you can open a seller account. In practice we see this vary per seller, but treat those ten weeks as a safe minimum. Especially heading into the fourth quarter, the busiest sales period, you do not want this waiting time to become your bottleneck. If you first want to know what you are getting into, read whether selling on bol is still worth it in 2026.
Why is your why the first step?
Before diving into the content, Jasper pauses on your motivation, because in practice he sees many beginners drop out after a while. All the knowledge in the world changes nothing if you do not apply it.
His advice: define your long-term goal (why do you want this, what do you picture), break it into quarterly goals and translate those into weekly goals. You can plug the topics from this case study straight into that, so you build a concrete plan for yourself. It is a short step, but it is the reason you keep going with the rest.
How do you do market research for your first product?
Market research starts with a starting point: you first need an idea or a product before you can analyse anything. For that, Jasper and Lars mainly use the Niche Explorer and the Product Database in MarktMentor, supplemented with sources outside bol such as the Amazon bestsellers and Pinterest. The tools focus on bol data; external sources deliver ideas that you then test against the bol data. It is both, not either-or.
The Niche Explorer searches at the search term level instead of the product level. That is deliberate: a single product always floats in a niche, and one product doing well says little about the market around it. You set filters on revenue and search volume. For a beginner, Jasper also sets a maximum revenue so the niche stays within budget; everyone wants a hundred thousand euros a month, but not everyone wants to put hundreds of thousands of euros into stock. As a guideline he uses a minimum of three to five hundred searches per month for beginners, although with a lot of competition that is on the low side. Lars likes to work with a funnel approach: start a bit broader, see what comes out and then refine.
Also look at the time period. By default the tool is set to thirty days; for a stable niche you actually want to look further back and compare year on year instead of only the last thirty days. Click on a keyword and you see historical data over up to two years, so you can judge the seasonal pattern yourself.
An important point about the numbers themselves. Two to three years ago, both positions and search volumes on bol were relatively easy to influence, among other things with bots that searched for a brand to get it into the search bar suggestions. Bol tackled that and filtered the bot traffic out in several updates, partly because bol wants to protect its own advertising revenue. The result is that search volume data is now more accurate than a few years ago. Do keep in mind that sellers' own searches also count in the search traffic, so net consumer traffic is slightly lower.
When assessing a niche you look at the supply and demand ratio, not at the sponsored results (they are there because someone paid for them and say nothing about the quality of a product). In the Niche Explorer you also see the distribution of impressions and sales, and it is often skewed: a large share of the relevant products barely gets any impressions or sales. If you are in the top five or ten, you roughly make the revenue the tool shows; that is your potential. The three pillars you steer on most in this phase are the search volume on page one, the number of reviews of your top competitors and the revenue of your top competitors. Read more about how this is built up in market research on bol.
Private label or reselling an existing brand?
For most starters private label is the better choice. When reselling an existing brand you compete on the buy box, where only one seller per product page gets the sale. For a beginner that is a price war you rarely win: established parties buy in bulk, have sharper purchase prices and a reputation that bol pushes forward more often. On top of that, for fulfilment by bol on the buy box you need at least 1,500 orders.
With your own brand you have more control over your product page and your photos, and wider margins because you can add something unique. In the Product Database you search at product level. Filter on products with only one seller and you exclude the buy box products, leaving products of which you can source and market a comparable variant yourself. We work out the choice between private label, white label and reselling further in private label, white label or reselling on bol.
How do you see whether a product is promising?
A promising product sits in a market with enough and preferably growing demand, with competitors you can still overtake and with room to differentiate. In this article the example product is a titanium cutting board, an emerging market that you can see in a search volume graph that has clearly risen over the past year.
First determine the type of demand. There are three: evergreen (always stable, ideal but rare), seasonal (peaks in certain periods) and hype (a steep rise that drops away just as fast). You want to avoid a hype on bol, because you then have to switch far too quickly. By looking further back you see the difference: the titanium cutting board shows a longer rise without the typical hype spike.
Next, look at the competitors on page one. In this example the top competitors still have under fifty reviews, which indicates the market is not yet saturated. Prices vary, and there are also more expensive products on page one; that is a sign the target group is willing to pay more, which leaves room for a healthy margin. Finally, watch for differentiation: your competitors' negative reviews are your opportunities. With this cutting board, for example, buyers complain that the product is not really titanium and that your knives go blunt quickly. Those are exactly the problems your product can answer.
How do you source via Alibaba?
For private label you usually source via Alibaba, the platform where many Chinese suppliers are listed and where you can pay and communicate safely. Search for your product, do not click an order button straight away, but first look at the supplier's own page: how long have they existed, are they verified, what do they offer.
Note the difference between a supplier (the actual manufacturer) and a trader (an intermediary). Neither is worse by definition; a trader often communicates more easily, but the price is not always sharper. Prices and the minimum order quantity (MOQ) are almost always negotiable. Jasper's tactic: ask several suppliers for price and MOQ and play them off against each other with a screenshot of a better offer. At some point there is no more give, and you will notice that by yourself.
Also look at the delivery terms. Jasper almost always recommends EXW: the supplier is then responsible up to the factory floor, and you arrange shipping from there. The more the supplier arranges, the more you pay; that is the trade-off. Your cash flow plays a role in the transport choice: sea freight is cheaper but takes longer (often four to six weeks), air freight is faster but more expensive. If a delivery takes long, you have to hold more stock to avoid selling out. A detailed step-by-step plan is in sourcing from China for bol.
How do you calculate your margin and ROI?
Calculate every product fully before you buy, with the Profit Calculator. You enter your purchase price, transport costs, the EAN costs, your fulfilment or shipping costs (with fulfilment by bol you add the pick-and-pack costs yourself), expected returns and any ad costs. Do not forget the import duties; they are often not high, but always check them. Make sure you enter everything in the same unit (per unit or total), otherwise the result is wrong.
In the worked example in this article Jasper buys a cutting board for around three euros, with a transport cost of about 25 cents per unit (an example order of 1,000 units came to roughly 257 euros in shipping). At an example selling price of almost 25 euros, the Profit Calculator left about 7.72 euros per unit sold, before ad and other costs. That is a worked example for illustration, not an expected result: ad costs, returns and duties still come on top and push the profit down.
What Jasper steers on is the ratio between what you spend upfront and what is left per sale, and not only the profit margin. Even a lower margin can be interesting if the amount you keep is high relative to your purchase cost, because it is about cash flow: how fast do you turn one euro into two, so you can reinvest again. A common beginner mistake is fixating on revenue without having your margins sharp, so you do not realise you are actually not profitable. Profit is only profit after all costs.
How much stock do you buy for your first order?
Your first order has to be big enough to build up data, but fit within your budget. Jasper looks at the sales of the top five competitors (in this example that fluctuates between 50 and 350 per month) and assumes for this niche that you make 50 to 100 sales per month once you get to the top.
He estimates a first order at 150 to 300 units, which in this example comes to roughly 450 to 1,000 euros in stock. This is a guideline, not a hard limit: it depends heavily on your product, your purchase price and your niche, and ad and other costs come on top. For a market of this size, Jasper advises against starting with a very small order of, say, 50 units, because you sell out too quickly and have too little data. Count on about three months to get everything from sourcing to delivery sorted.
How do you ship from China to the Netherlands?
For shipping you work with a freight forwarder, a party that brings your products from the factory to the Netherlands and handles the import. Larger parties often have a dashboard and can advance costs; a smaller party is more personal but requires you to pay on time. Make your own choice there based on how you want to work.
For storage and shipping in the Netherlands you choose a fulfilment partner. Pay attention to the dimensions of your product in relation to the storage costs and shipping rates: with a large product the storage costs weigh more, with a cheap product the shipping rates do. Not every fulfilment partner accepts new sellers or every type of product, so check that in advance. Jasper advises beginners against shipping yourself: it costs time every day, delivers nothing extra and is one of the points where starters drop out. Also cost in your own hours, otherwise you are soon working below minimum wage.
What do you arrange before your product goes live?
Production at the manufacturer takes two to six weeks from experience and shipping by boat four to six weeks, so you have plenty of time to build your product page while your order is on its way. Start with two things: your EAN code and your keywords.
You create your EAN code at GS1, the only permitted issuer for bol. Do not use a code from another party: there are sellers who saw a product with hundreds of reviews removed overnight because the code was not created via GS1, and bol is getting stricter on this because of European regulation. Read more in GS1 EAN codes for bol.
For your keywords you use the Keyword Guide. Consumers have to be able to find your product on bol, and that largely happens via the keywords in your title and description. Enter one or more competitors' EAN codes and you get the keywords they are found on, with for each term the search volume, the competition, how many sales you need to rank and the matching category. Only choose keywords that really carry traffic and that fit your category; a term you are found on but that does not fit your product is wasted space. Put your brand name and the most important words at the front of your title, because the title weighs heaviest and the order counts. Collect the chosen terms in a keyword list so you have them at hand when writing your listing.
How do you convince the buyer on your product page?
Your product page is the only place where a buyer gets to know your product; they cannot hold, smell or feel it, so you have to visualise it for them. So work with a set of about six to seven images plus a video, and give every image a clear angle: if you removed the text, it should still be visible what it is about.
You take your unique selling points from the pain points customers buy on. Look at competitors' reviews and images and find the common thread; if many sellers show how easy the product is to clean, for example, you make an image about that too. Photography is best outsourced unless you can really do it well yourself, because with only a phone the result is often mediocre. Video is a bit different: a slightly less polished video feels more credible. Jasper mentions a client whose conversion rose from five to ten percent within a week by adding a video shot with a phone, while she first doubted whether it was good enough. That is an example from his practice, not a guaranteed outcome.
For your first reviews: faking is not allowed, and at scale it is even illegal in the Netherlands. What is allowed is politely asking for an honest review. With an order you in principle have one contact moment with the customer, originally meant for the invoice. In that email you may also give some extra information and ask for a review, for example with a few usage tips. You may not give a product, money or discount in exchange for a review. With the email campaigns in MarktMentor you set up such emails within the guidelines; start doing that from your first order.
How do you get your first sales after launch?
After launch your product rarely sits at the top straight away, and that is a problem, because about eighty percent of buyers only look at page one. So your goal is visibility, and you have two levers for that: your organic ranking and ads.
You follow your organic position with the Ranking tracker, per keyword. A new product often starts around position 100 or 200 and climbs week after week, but only if you make sales, and you do not make sales without visibility. That is the chicken-and-egg situation you break with advertising. For a beginner the starting point is an automatic Sponsored Products campaign with a small daily budget; see what happens and adjust based on your data.
Two concepts matter here. Your ACoS is the percentage of your selling price that you spend to make a sale; if that gets higher than your profit margin, your ads are loss-making. The exception is when your ranking is rising fast, because then that spend is temporarily more of an investment. Your TACoS sets your ad costs against your total revenue; if you make a lot of revenue organically, your ACoS may disappoint as long as your TACoS stays healthy.
How do you optimise after launch?
Optimising is watching a few numbers with a clear course: do you now mainly want to become more profitable or grab market share? At the start, profitability is usually the most important, because it lets you scale up faster. In My Performance you see your profit once all cost components are filled in, your conversion set against the benchmark of your niche, and your ranking. Enter your costs at product level properly and consistently, otherwise the numbers are wrong; we read in commission and ad costs automatically, you enter your purchase and shipping costs yourself.
You also steer on your cash flow, because the faster you turn one euro into two, the faster you can reinvest. That sits in your payment agreement with the supplier (upfront or afterwards), your MOQ, a sharper deal with your fulfilment partner at higher volume and combined shipments with your freight forwarder. In the Netherlands you can apply for an Article 23 permit, so you do not advance the import VAT but settle it in your return. Business financing or a credit card can create room, for example heading into the fourth quarter, but this is not financial advice. Also look at your biggest ROI: which products bring in the most euros, and can you free up money from slow products for better ones. And watch how you divide your time; at some point you focus on the leverage tasks instead of daily chores like manually processing returns and invoices, which you can partly automate.
Summary: the starter route in steps
- Arrange the basics. KVK registration, legal form (a sole proprietorship for most starters), business bank account, VAT and OSS registration. Count on at least ten weeks of KVK registration before your bol account.
- Define your goal. Translate your long-term goal into quarterly and weekly goals, so you keep going.
- Do market research with data. Steer on search volume on page one, reviews of top competitors and their revenue. Avoid hypes.
- Choose private label. Private label gives you more control and wider margins than reselling an A-brand.
- Source with a solid basis. Negotiate on price and MOQ, consider EXW and calculate your product fully in the Profit Calculator before you order.
- Choose your logistics. Work with a freight forwarder and a fulfilment partner; shipping yourself is not advisable for beginners.
- Build a strong page. GS1 code, keywords via the Keyword Guide, a title with your brand name at the front, photos with a clear angle and an honest review request.
- Launch and adjust. Follow your ranking, start with a small automatic ad campaign and watch your ACoS and TACoS.
- Optimise. Keep an eye on profit, conversion, ranking and cash flow and work on your biggest ROI.
Everything above together is enough to work towards your first 1,000 euros in revenue on bol. What comes after that, from scaling up to expanding your range, is a next step.
Want to explore a niche yourself, compare competitors and calculate your margin and ROI like in this article? You do that with the product research tools in MarktMentor.