Bol.com

The framework for product research on bol: from market potential to profit

Lars Hurkmans·Co-founder·21 January 2026·Reading time 14 minutes

Good product research on bol follows a funnel. You first do a quick check of a niche's market potential, meaning demand and supply, and only if there is room do you go deeper step by step into differentiation, launch strategy and profit. That way you only put more research into a niche when it is probably worth it.

This is part 3 of our product research series. In parts 1 and 2 we looked at how the bol market works and at the bol market in numbers. Now we explain the framework you use to assess a concrete niche: which questions you ask in which order, and why you only do deeper research once a niche deserves it. The whole structure ties in with our broader piece on market research on bol.

Which framework do you use for product research on bol?

Use a funnel, or pyramid: you start with a quick check and add more research at each step, but only if the previous step looks promising. The order is market potential, then market depth and differentiation, then the launch strategy, and finally the profit.

The idea is that you do not need to be a product expert at the start. You may not even know yet that the niche you will eventually sell in exists. That is why you work from broad to deep:

• Market potential. How big is the market and how strong is the supply? You want to see this very quickly: is there potential, yes or no? If not, you do not research the rest.
• Market depth and differentiation. Which products and sellers are in the niche, and is there still room for a new product? You determine that from the specifications, the prices and the reviews. In this phase you slowly become a product expert.
• Launch strategy. How do you get the product to customers? Think of advertising via sponsored products, the main image, the title and the description, and possibly traffic from outside bol.
• Profit. What is left once you work through the cost components? That is the final step, in which you dive deepest into the numbers.

The gain of this approach is time. If you see at the market potential stage that there is little room, you stop and research another category. If you conclude further down that a niche is not worth it, you go back one step. That way you only put more effort into research when it is likely to pay off, and every step you get further increases the chance that you continue.

What is market potential and why do you check it first?

Market potential is how big the market is (the market value and the demand) set against how strong the supply is, and whether there is still room in it. You check it first because without market potential you sell nothing, however good the rest of your research is.

A big market without too much supply is interesting to enter. So is a market that is growing strongly, because then there is room for more sellers: the pie the money goes to gets bigger, and as a new seller you can share in that. You assess market potential on two components, demand and supply, and you include a third from the start: investment potential. We go through those three below.

How do you assess demand for a product on bol?

You assess demand on four indicators: search volume, impressions, market value and sales. Bol shares search volume itself via the bol search trends; it does not share market value and sales, so for those you need specialised product research tools.

• Search volume. How often a keyword is searched for. This is broad and easy to find, and a good start for getting a general picture of demand.
• Impressions. How often products have been shown, for a keyword or in a category. Impressions are an improvement over search volume, because they are specifically about products rather than about a broad search term.
• Market value. How much revenue goes through a category or around a keyword.
• Sales. How often products are actually sold.

Bol does not release market value and sales. You get those from product research tools, such as MarktMentor's, for example with a Chrome extension that shows the estimated sales and revenue on the bol product page. For search volume you can use the free bol search trends. Besides how high demand is, you also want to know what kind of demand it is and whether the market is growing. We cover that in the next two questions.

Is a niche evergreen, seasonal or hype?

Determine the type of demand by looking at a niche's historical data over a longer period. An evergreen niche stays stable all year round, a seasonal niche peaks in one period of the year, and a hype rises fast and then falls back to its old level.

• Evergreen. In this article we look at laundry strips: over a period of two years sales stay fairly stable, without clear peaks. The advantage is that you sell all year round, which is handy if timing your stock management is still tricky. The disadvantage is the flip side: precisely because you can sell all year round, evergreen niches are often competitive.
• Seasonal. The table fan peaks in search volume around the summer months and performs much worse the rest of the year. Around the peak everything has to be in order: stock, product and marketing. The peak can be higher than what an evergreen achieves over a whole year, but stock management is more complicated and the risk is greater, because you have fewer moments to sell.
• Hype. The water table was much higher in 2023 than a year later. If you only look at the 2023 data, it seems to be growing fast, whereas in hindsight it was a peak period. If you know something is a hype, you can play into it, provided you get ahead of the top of the hype. If you do not know, you enter too late and invest in a product that no longer sells.

As a rule of thumb: evergreen is generally easier, seasonal is harder and hype is extremely hard. These examples are illustrations from this article to show the type of demand, not recommendations. How to read the historical curve is worked out further in historical data and product choice on bol.

How do you recognise a growth market on bol?

You recognise a growth market by looking at a niche's data at least one year and ideally two years back, and checking whether search volume, market value and sales are structurally rising. Never look only at the past month or the past half year, because then you confuse a seasonal peak or a hype with real growth.

Growth markets are interesting because there is almost automatically room for more sellers: the pie gets bigger, so as a new seller you get in more easily. Shrinking markets are what you want to avoid. There the pie gets smaller and the existing sellers are often already better positioned, so it is hard to get in between them. In this article the treadmill is the example of a growth market: viewed over two years there is stable growth in it.

For search volume you use the bol search trends, although you do not see the growth trend directly in them; for that you need specialist tools. Bol is a broad platform, so new growth markets keep appearing. The question is mainly where you find them and how. It gets a bit harder every year to find successful niches, but as long as you steer towards growth markets, it remains possible.

How strong is the supply in a niche?

You assess supply on the competing listings: the number of products, the number of sellers and the number and type of brands. Do not look only at the counts, but at the names behind them, because those determine how heavy the competition really is.

In this article the lava lamp is one of the ten candidates. At that moment there are about 1,200 products, offered by 33 brands and 83 sellers. At first sight that is off-putting: 1,200 products and 83 sellers sounds like a lot. Look at the names, and the picture changes. Many of the biggest brands are unbranded, and unbranded products have no name recognition; with a good listing you often already beat them. The remaining brands are small and barely known to consumers. Among the sellers there is one point of attention: bol itself is the seller for about 5% of the products. That is a fair amount, but not so much that it makes the niche very competitive.

So the lesson is: do not be put off by the first numbers, but dig deeper into the composition. You cannot simply get the number of sellers and brands from bol; for that you need more advanced analysis tools. Those numbers (1,200 products, 33 brands, 83 sellers, 5% from bol) are the example figures for this niche from this article, not a norm that applies to every category.

What do the reviews say about perceived quality?

Reviews show how consumers experience the existing products. If the reviews are predominantly positive, that is a disadvantage for a new seller, because you still have to build a whole reputation yourself. If you see a lot of criticism, there is room for someone who solves those complaints.

On bol, consumers only see a score of 4 or higher as really good. For the lava lamp in this article the average score is 3.8 with 117 reviews over the past year. That is not bad: the number of reviews is limited and the score is not super high. Moreover, there are quite a few 1, 2 or 3 star reviews among them, and that means there is still criticism of the products and so room for a seller who does better.

You research perceived quality in two ways. You can manually go through all the products on bol and note the scores and counts, which many sellers do, although then you do not see the distribution of the stars. Or you use review analysis in specialised software, where per niche you see how many reviews are added over time, what the scores are and how the pros and cons are distributed. That way you quickly see whether a niche is already saturated in terms of quality. The figures 3.8 and 117 are again the example for this niche, not a target value.

Which types of sellers and brands do you come across on bol?

You come across roughly four types of sellers (bol itself, wholesalers, vendors and private label sellers) and four types of brands (A-brands, B-brands, bol originals, meaning private label, and unbranded). Together they determine the level of competition in a niche.

The four types of sellers:

• bol itself. If bol is dominant in a niche, that is a warning. Bol often has sharp prices and good delivery times and sells products it knows sell well.
• Wholesalers. Often offer better-known brands and usually compete for the buy box. A lot of supply from wholesalers can be a signal that a niche is less interesting, although you can sometimes compete via a lower price.
• Vendors. Sellers who offer a brand on bol. Sometimes the brand itself does not sell, like Apple, which lets other parties sell; sometimes it does, like XXL Nutrition, which supplies sellers and also sells itself. These are often well-known brands consumers search for specifically, so the competition there is heavier.
• Private label sellers. Sellers who have started their own brand on bol. As a private label seller you fall into this group yourself, and these are the products that most resemble what you are going to offer. This is where your focus lies.

The four types of brands:

• A-brands. Are purely about name recognition. You want to avoid these, because almost all the traffic goes to the brand itself. Only with a much lower price can you sometimes still win some consumers.
• B-brands. Cheaper brands people sometimes do know, such as Tristar. Consumers here choose on price rather than on absolute quality, so with a neat listing you can compete reasonably well.
• bol originals (private label). Sellers who, like you, have started their own brand and do practically the same thing. These are your direct competitors. Look closely at their reviews and listing; if they have optimised everything perfectly, it gets harder.
• Unbranded. Usually the easiest to compete with, because these products are about price and often have a poorly optimised listing. If you come across many unbranded products, that can actually be an interesting niche.

How much can you invest and how fast do you earn it back?

Include investment potential from the start: the product costs (purchase plus forwarding, getting your products to the Netherlands, often from China), the shipping costs and the advertising costs. A higher selling price is not automatically better, because more expensive products tie up more capital and you earn it back in bigger, slower steps.

The first thing you do is determine the price level: you link the selling price to the purchase costs and the forwarding. On bol a high selling price usually goes together with a high purchase price. As a result you can buy fewer units, you have a smaller stock and you earn it back in bigger steps. That does not necessarily make more expensive products attractive if you have a small starting capital.

That becomes clear with the ROI (return on investment): the profit per product relative to the costs. With an ROI of 100% you can buy one new unit for every product sold, so double your stock if you sell out. Two calculation examples from this article, purely to show the principle:

• A lava lamp of about 22 euros achieves an ROI of around 21% if the product costs do not exceed 5.50 euros (excluding shipping and commission costs).
• A treadmill of about 230 euros only achieves that same ROI of around 21% with product costs up to about 129 euros.

Roughly speaking, for the money of one treadmill you can buy about 65 lava lamps. The lava lamp has a much higher turnover rate, so you earn your stock back in much smaller steps and grow faster. With a small starting capital, cheaper products are therefore often more interesting; with a bigger starting capital, those bigger products matter less. Treat the 22 euros, 230 euros and 21% as illustrative calculation examples, not as margins to expect.

The dimensions play a part because they are tied to the shipping and forwarding costs and to how many units you get into a container to the Netherlands. Large, heavy products cost more to ship and deliver, and that squeezes your margin. In this article a pair of blue light glasses, a small product, costs about 2.44 euros in shipping at a selling price of 10 euros, so relatively speaking you still keep a decent margin. The worst combination is a large, heavy product with a low selling price. You would rather look for large products with a higher selling price, such as the treadmill, or small products with a lower selling price, such as computer glasses or a lava lamp, of which you can send many at once.

What does advertising on bol cost and how do you factor it in?

You estimate advertising costs with the average winning bid (the average price you pay per click to advertise on a keyword or category) and the conversion (how many clicks you need for one sale). Together they determine your advertising cost per sale, which you then set against the selling price.

Advertising on bol works via sponsored products, and you pay per click: if a consumer does not click, it costs nothing, and if they do click, you pay roughly the average winning bid. The share of your revenue that goes to advertising is called the ACoS. If the bid is high, your budget runs out quickly; and how many clicks you need for one sale depends on your conversion.

Why you have to look at those two together is shown by an example from this article. Grill plates there cost 49 euros on average, computer glasses 20 euros on average:

At first sight grill plates look more favourable: a higher selling price and a lower bid. But at a conversion of 2.5% you need about 40 visitors for one sale, which comes to around 15.20 euros in advertising costs per sale. The computer glasses have a higher bid, but thanks to the higher conversion of 6.1% the cost per sale is lower in absolute terms. Set against the selling price, the grill plate at approx. 30.4% is actually more favourable than the computer glasses at approx. 41%. These are the example figures from this article, not results to expect.

What matters: look at the average winning bid, the selling price and the conversion together. A common strategy is to run a number of sales via advertising so that you are found better organically, and then scale advertising down. Many sellers do calculate purchase and shipping costs, but do not properly include the advertising costs, and as a result never end up profitable. That is why we put this component in the framework from the start. You will not find the average winning bid as standard; for that you use specialist software such as MarktMentor.

Do you research via keywords or via categories?

You can start research via keywords or via categories. Keywords are a good starting point, but too limited to base your whole research on. Categories are better defined and show the market value straight away. In our view categories are the best starting point, with keywords as a supplement.

Most sellers start with keywords, via the bol search trends or a tool with an extension. That is a fine exploration, but keywords are supporting: a keyword is often general, says little about the products behind it and reflects consumers' intent more than whether they actually buy. The mistake many sellers make is basing everything on one keyword. You need an overview of all relevant keywords. For that we use MarktMentor's Niche Explorer, a database with bol's relevant keywords in which you can carry out the research from this framework.

The better data source is the categories. Those are the places where products are found on bol, and they are more specific than keywords. Categories are built hierarchically, from large to small, and precisely the smallest categories are a good starting point: there you see the market value, the growth trends and the type of demand straight away. The disadvantage is that this data is less accessible and that you need an exclusive tool for it. In this article we use the Panorama tool within MarktMentor for that. If you have little budget at the start, such a category tool may be out of reach, and then research via keywords is a good alternative, provided you set it up broadly and do not pin it on one keyword.

In part 4 we do the research step by step via keywords with the Niche Explorer, based on the ten candidates from this article. For the category perspective we go through the same framework with Panorama.

Summary: the framework in steps

• Market potential first. A quick check of demand and supply. If there is no potential, you stop and look at another category.
• Demand. Assess on search volume, impressions, market value and sales. Type the niche as evergreen, seasonal or hype, and as growth or decline, by looking at at least one to two years of history.
• Supply. Count and dissect the competing listings (products, sellers, brands), read the reviews for perceived quality, and watch the types of sellers (bol, wholesale, vendors, private label) and brands (A, B, bol originals, unbranded).
• Investment potential. Weigh ROI and turnover rate, dimensions and advertising costs (average winning bid and conversion, set against the selling price). A high selling price is not automatically better.
• Entry point. Categories are the best starting point (Panorama), keywords a good supplement (Niche Explorer).
• Funnel. Every step costs more time, so only continue if the previous step looks promising.

With this you have the framework to assess a niche from market potential to profit. In part 4 we apply it via keywords with the Niche Explorer.