Bol.com

Why do so many new bol sellers stop within 3 months?

Lars Hurkmans·Co-founder·25 March 2026·Reading time 9 minutes

Most new sellers don't stop because selling on bol is too hard, but because they don't see five pitfalls coming: their margin evaporates after all the costs, their cash flow stalls, the competition has hardened, it takes more time than promised, and compliance is underestimated. Anyone who calculates and covers those five beforehand belongs to the half that does keep going.

We see it happen regularly: people come in full of ambition and are gone again within three months. Roughly half of new sellers stop in that first period. That's not an official bol figure, but what we see in practice. At the same time, thousands of sellers simply earn good money on the platform, so it isn't bol's fault. The difference lies in the five pitfalls below, and whether you cover them in time.

Why does your margin evaporate on bol?

Because your gross margin is something very different from what's left net. Between your sale price and your profit sit bol's commission, shipping, packaging, returns and advertising costs. If you don't calculate those in beforehand, you think you have a fat margin while in reality only a few percent remains.

A simple example. You find a product with a sale price of 50 euros and a purchase price of 25 euros. On paper that's 25 euros profit, a gross margin of 50 percent. Looks fine at first glance. But then the skimming starts:

• bol charges on average around 12 percent commission: 6 euros off.
• Shipping via LVB costs 4.50 euros in this example.
• Packaging costs 1.50 euros.
• With a return rate of 10 percent you lose on average another 3 euros or so per product sold.
• And advertising: with a TACOS (your advertising costs as a percentage of your revenue) of 12 percent, which is fairly normal, almost 6 euros comes off.

Together that's about 20 to 21 euros off your 25 euros gross profit. That leaves roughly 4 euros, a net margin of just under 8 percent. And we haven't even counted bookkeeping, storage costs, damaged products and your own working hours. Add those in too and you quickly drop towards 7 percent or lower. That's the point: not that you make somewhat less profit than hoped, but that a 50 percent margin on paper turns out to be a 7 percent margin in practice.

So what is a healthy margin? That depends on how long your money is tied up. If you ship your first test products by plane, 20 percent is roughly the floor. If it goes by boat or train, you should plan for closer to 28 percent, because slower transport ties up your money longer and your margin needs to compensate for that. Treat these as guidelines, not hard limits; it shifts per category and shipping method.

Even more important than your margin is your ROI: how often you earn back your money. With a 100 percent ROI you earn back every euro invested once, and that means you can grow faster without constantly adding new capital. A product with 30 percent margin but a low turnover speed can turn out worse than a product with 15 percent margin that sells ten times as fast. Starters often only look at the margin, forget the advertising costs and the turnover speed, and as a result get stuck when scaling up: no room to keep growing, no buffer for new stock, and no room to pay themselves a salary.

How do you prevent this? Calculate everything before you buy, not after. Not just purchase price minus sale price, but commission, shipping, packaging, returns and advertising costs combined. That's what our profit calculator is for: it forces you to fill in every cost item, so you know whether a product is profitable before you order 5,000 euros of stock instead of after. Exactly which costs play a role and how they affect your margin is worked out in profitability on bol.

Why does almost every bol seller get stuck on cash flow?

Because your money goes out before it comes in, and that gap grows along with your success. You pay your supplier immediately, but bol pays out at most twice a month. And as soon as that money is in, you already need to order new stock to stay visible. So your money is tied up almost constantly.

The sting is in the growth. At first glance, cash flow looks like a luxury problem, because it means your products are selling well. But say you sell 100 products a month and want to go to 300. Then you need to buy three times as much stock before you even see the proceeds of those extra sales. Growth continuously demands capital.

A calculation example makes it stark: if you want to take a stable 2,000 euros net salary out of your business each month, with a 30 percent profit margin you quickly need 40,000 to 50,000 euros in revenue per month. Not because 2,000 euros is so much, but because most of your margin is tied up in new stock and growth. Treat it as a rough guide, not a guarantee; it mainly shows how much revenue needs to sit under a modest salary.

Why do people drop off here? They start without a buffer for reorders. They go out of stock due to lack of money, and that hurts their ranking: sold out means no sales, and without sales your position drops back. Why that works that way is covered in why a new product on bol starts at the bottom. After that, personal finances come under pressure, and then it's over.

How do you prevent it? Start with enough working capital, a buffer for three to six months, and not just for your first order but also for reorders. Steer on ROI, not just margin: a product with 20 percent margin and a 150 percent ROI is better than 40 percent margin with a 50 percent ROI. And grow in a controlled way. Don't jump from 100 to 300 products a month in one go, but from 100 to 150, then to 200, and only then to 300, so your cash flow grows along with it.

Why has the competition on bol gotten so much tougher?

Because there are many more sellers and the easy years are over. Where you used to be able to sell without an optimised listing, without ads and without a strategy, that no longer works now, simply because everyone does that by now.

Look at the numbers. In this article we mention a doubling from roughly 20,000 sellers in 2018 to over 45,000 now. According to bol itself it's even higher: the platform already announced its 50,000th selling partner in 2022, almost doubling in three years, and that number has grown further since (source: over.bol.com). However you count it, the playing field has gotten a lot fuller. Concrete consequence: the top three to four positions in the search results are nowadays almost always sponsored. Advertising is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.

And new competition keeps arriving. Wholesalers sell directly on bol, manufacturers from China and Europe are joining, and established brands like Sony sell directly. Anyone in a category that's purely about price ends up in a price war nobody wins.

People stop here because they can't compete on price, because the advertising costs are too high for their thin margin, and because they have no differentiation. They're often in exactly the same category as dozens of others, because they used the same product research method. There's little profit left to make there.

How do you prevent this? Differentiate from day one. Choose a private label brand or a strong niche, and don't copy what everyone already does. A private label brand protects you, as does a niche wholesalers aren't in. Branded shelves, a relatively new ad format on bol, can help with that. Differentiation is no longer a nice-to-have, but the foundation. Where you find that room in the market is covered in market research on bol.

How much time does selling on bol really take?

Plan for 15 to 25 hours a week, and in the beginning closer to 25 than 15. The promise of passive income, or of 10,000 euros in revenue within a few months with little work, doesn't match what a running bol shop actually demands.

Where does that time go?

• Product research: quickly 10 to 20 hours a week in the beginning. You need to learn what works and how to read the data.
• Building and optimising your listing: another 5 to 10 hours a week. Better photos, better copy, A/B testing.
• Customer service: at least an hour daily, depending on your volume. People simply ask about everything.
• Inventory management: timing orders, predicting how much you need, not going out of stock. About 5 hours a week.

Add that up and you're quickly at 15 to 25 hours a week, and that's once you've already figured out the game. In the learning phase you'd better plan for that 25 hours.

People stop because the promise of passive income doesn't materialise, and because alongside a full-time job they simply don't have that time. Eventually they wonder why they ever started. So be realistic beforehand. This isn't a five-hour-a-week side job. If you don't have those hours, you can outsource parts of it, for example logistics to a fulfilment centre. That costs money, but it gives you time back to steer on growth.

Which compliance rules are underestimated on bol?

CE marking, product liability, insurance and NVWA inspections. It's a lot to arrange, so it's understandable it puts you off, but it has to be done, and in 2026 more strictly than ever. The NVWA runs spot checks through bol listings, and bol takes products offline that don't comply.

An example from our own experience. We once sold dog leashes that discourage barking. Since that summer, shock functions had been banned in the Netherlands. Our leash didn't have that function, but the photos used did show a shock function icon. The NVWA spotted that, and bol took the product offline until we could show it met the legal requirements. Wrong photo, product offline, purely out of negligence. That was in 2020; in 2026 enforcement here is even stricter.

Why is this such a pitfall? If your product gets taken offline while you have 2,000 units in stock, you're left with a problem you can't just solve. How do you prevent it? Check the rules before you order. Don't spend a euro without validated documents from your supplier. Exactly what needs to be right, from CE marking to labelling, is covered in applying for CE marking, and in our Knowledge Base we walk you through the whole process step by step.

Summary: how do you stay among the half that keeps going?

In short, the five pitfalls and how you cover them:

• Your margin evaporates. Calculate all costs before you order (commission, shipping, packaging, returns, advertising), not just purchase and sale price.
• Your cash flow stalls. Start with three to six months of working capital, steer on ROI, and grow in a controlled way.
• The competition has hardened. Differentiate with a private label brand or a strong niche and avoid price-war categories.
• The time is underestimated. Plan for 15 to 25 hours a week, or outsource parts of it.
• Compliance is underestimated. Check CE marking and the rules before you order.

The half that stops and the half that earns good money differ mainly in three things: preparation, realistic expectations, and decisions based on numbers instead of gut feeling. We work with data and therefore see what does and doesn't work, and we're happy to share that, so you don't have to make the same mistakes as the half that drops out.