Case studies

More than €50,000 in monthly revenue on bol.com within 6 months? Read how Nick van de Sande did it!

Lars Hurkmans·Co-founder·25 August 2023·Reading time 11 minutes

Nick van de Sande built a bol store in six months that hits more than €50,000 in revenue a month. In this interview he tells us the steps he took: from a course and testing products through European suppliers to brand registration, sponsored products and MarktMentor's data.

What were you doing before you decided to sell on bol.com?

I started as a shelf stacker at Jumbo. After a year and a half I'd been promoted to team lead of the stocking crew. Around the same time I'd also finished secondary school. After I got my diploma, Jumbo offered me a track where I could train to become a retail manager. Since at that point I didn't really know what I wanted to do after secondary school, I decided to follow that training. It was set up practically, meaning you both work and study at the same time. On top of that, I also got a salary during the training, which I could use to save up. I finished that training earlier this year.

Why did you decide to start selling on bol.com?

During the period I was being trained by Jumbo, I realised this wasn't quite the path I wanted to take. So towards the end of the training I started exploring other career paths. Through YouTube and TikTok I came into contact with the world of e-commerce and online entrepreneurship. That really appealed to me, since in principle you can earn money from home. At some point a teammate from my football team told me he wanted to start selling on bol.com and asked if I wanted to join him. Since I had nothing to lose and it seemed like a fun adventure, I decided to join him.

How did you gain the knowledge to sell online?

Since neither of us had any knowledge or experience selling on bol.com, we bought a course. That course helped us determine a good strategy for selling our first products. The course's strategy consists of several steps, where you start without having any idea which product(s) you want to sell. The first step is looking for potentially profitable products, which you can find using MarktMentor's product research tools.

Once you've found a number of these products using MarktMentor's data, you want to test in practice which products sell best. Through the course's connections, I got in touch with a number of Eastern European suppliers where I could buy in products on a small scale, so I didn't run the risk of ending up with too large a stock that wouldn't sell out.

Because I was selling several products at once, I could get a good sense of which of these products would sell the fastest. After a month I had a good idea of which products could grow into top sellers. For those products I then decided to buy in larger stock through Chinese suppliers.

How did you gain extra knowledge outside the course?

After finishing the course, I also did my own research into selling on bol.com. This was mainly about specific details that weren't covered in the course. For example, I made a lot of use of bol.com's partner platform, where a lot of free information is available. On top of that, there's a lot of information on YouTube that really helped me with more specific questions I had. Things like how to use sponsored products well.

How did you use MarktMentor to find potentially profitable products?

At first I had no idea which product I wanted to sell, so I started searching without any preconceptions. Since I was also a beginning seller, I was looking for niches with a lot of demand and little competition. Through MarktMentor's Niche Explorer I could very easily find niches that matched exactly these requirements, since for every niche you can filter on the number of competitors, revenue and search volume.

Initially I wanted to sell seasonal products, which I could find through the Niche Explorer by filtering on seasons (winter, spring, summer, autumn). Later I also wanted to find products that sell all year round, which you can also filter for in the Niche Explorer by using the Evergreen filter.

That way I was able to find a broad list of niches that initially seemed interesting to me. I then started digging more specifically into the products within these niches. For this I made a lot of use of MarktMentor's Product Database, where you can filter on individual products. Since I wanted to sell a product that could offer distinctiveness within the niche, I initially made a lot of use of the Product Database's review filters, so I could see what could be improved about the products. I could also use that information later when I wanted to build my product listings.

I also made a lot of use of the dimension filters, since a product's dimensions play a crucial role in the profit margins you can achieve. For example, it's important to know how much space a product takes up when you use a fulfilment centre, since this affects the storage costs you pay. It's also important to know how the product is delivered to the customer. Some products, for example, are delivered through the letterbox, while others arrive as a package. Depending on the dimensions, the shipping costs you pay are different. That's why it's important to know a product's dimensions and exactly how it's packaged.

All the products that seemed interesting to me, I ultimately saved in the Product Radar. I come back here regularly to see which products I've collected. I also keep the list here of products I still want to sell in the future.

What did your preparation look like before your first products went online?

Once we'd bought the course, we quickly registered with the Chamber of Commerce (KVK). After that we started the process to open our bol store, which took 10 weeks to wait after registering with the KVK.

Thanks to the European suppliers we used to test our products, we were able to put products online pretty quickly once the store was live. So we had to get to work on making product listings right away. In the beginning these listings were still fairly simple. For example, at first we sold unbranded and the photos were fairly basic. We did have all our test products registered with GS1 right away, so we were compliant with bol.com's rules on that front. Since we also used European suppliers, the rules around CE marking were already in order for these products.

We noticed pretty quickly that our product listings were being hijacked by other bol sellers, because all our products were unbranded. So we decided fairly quickly to register a brand with the BOIP and also pass this on to bol.com, so we no longer had that problem with other sellers on our products.

Once we later decided to also buy in products through China, we first had to find a good supplier. Then we also had to make sure the products would be shipped safely from China to the Netherlands. Although our Chinese supplier had offered to handle this process for us, we decided to work with a Dutch forwarding company instead. Firstly because communication with them happens in Dutch, and secondly because they could give us more assurance that the products would actually arrive safely in the Netherlands.

While the products were being shipped from China to the Netherlands, in the meantime we spent more attention on improving our listings. We improved the listing photos and adjusted the product texts.

How did you launch your products?

At first we made a lot of use of sponsored products to become more findable. The idea here was to get our first sales through sponsoring, after which we tried to collect reviews. In the beginning we still weren't selling that much, despite advertising. So we thought we might need to make our product listing even better. That's when I discovered your tool also had a listing optimiser you can use to analyse how good your product listing is. On top of that, this optimiser also helps you write the listing based on the right structure.

Through the listing optimiser I realised we needed to bring out much more clearly in the listing what made our product distinctive compared to competitors offering a similar product. So we took another good look at what criticisms or pain points consumers raised about our competitors' products and compared them with the products we sold. By showing how our product addressed these pain points, we hoped to increase our conversions.

Initially we only applied this to the listing text, but soon we also started incorporating it into the images. After doing this we noticed we were slowly starting to sell more through sponsored products. The next step was getting reviews. The way we did this was by sending the customer an invoice, in which we also included a request to leave a review. We also included thank-you cards with the products. Although it's hard to test whether this worked, we did see that as we sold more, we also slowly started getting positive product reviews, which further helped us improve the listing. We also got more positive reviews on our seller account, which in our view also had a positive impact on the upward trend in the number of sales we achieved.

How do you still use sponsored products now?

Now that our products are also found better organically, I only use sponsored products for keywords where we rank low. Through MarktMentor I can see the organic position of our products for all keywords, which lets us determine which keywords we should sponsor and which not. I can also see over time whether my position is improving or worsening. I also use this information to determine which keywords I can sponsor.

I also use MarktMentor's Keyword Guide to see which keywords my competitors are found under. Sometimes I come across keywords here that I haven't used in my listing, meaning I'm not found under them. Since I don't want to overload my product title with keywords, I sometimes sponsor these keywords instead.

What are your future plans?

Our products in the baby category are our best sellers. We want to expand our brand for the products in this category. So we're researching which complementary products we can add to our assortment for this category to grow our brand.

We also have the ambition to start our own webshop, from which we'll sell the products under our own brand. For this we want to use Shopify.

What 6 tips do you have for beginning sellers?