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MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you do product research on bol?

Lars Hurkmans·Co-founder·22 July 2026·Temps de lecture 7 minutes

Good product research on bol means you first assess whether a market has potential, and only then pick a product, working from broad to specific. Both MarktMentor and Rylee are tools that help you with this, but they take a different approach: with MarktMentor you research an entire market, while with Rylee, a product database with an extension, you mainly look at individual products. That difference determines how far you get in your research.

How do you approach good product research on bol?

Like a funnel, or a pyramid. You start very broad with a quick scan, and at each step you go a little deeper, but only if the previous step looks promising. The order is market potential, then market analysis, then distinctiveness, then launch strategy, and finally profit.

The nice thing is that at the start you don't need to be a product expert yet. It's entirely possible you don't even know yet which niche you'll end up selling in. That's why you work from broad to deep: each step takes more time, so you only move on if it's likely to pay off. If the first step already shows little room, you stop and look at a different niche, because why would you research further what won't work anyway? If you do go through the whole funnel, you naturally become the expert in that market along the way. The complete step-by-step plan with examples is in the framework for product research on bol.

Step 1: is there market potential?

Market potential is the first and most important filter: how big is the demand in a niche, measured against how strong the existing supply already is, and is there still room? You want to be able to give a quick yes or no here, without already knowing much about a specific product. You assess it from two sides: demand and supply.

You measure demand with a few indicators, depending on what bol makes available:

• Search volume. How often a keyword is searched for. That says something about intent, so whether eyes are on it, but not about the value in euros.
• Impressions. Where no search volume is available, for example for categories, you can often still see how often products have been shown. That's the equivalent of search volume, but at the product or category level.
• Revenue and sales. The harder numbers: how much money changes hands and how many units are sold. Those give the best picture of how big a market really is.

With these indicators you can also see what kind of demand it is. An evergreen niche stays fairly stable all year round. A seasonal niche has a clear peak, think of summer items that sell strongly in summer and much less the rest of the year. And a hype shoots up and then drops back to a much lower level. That type partly determines whether and when you want to enter.

You assess the supply side: how many products and sellers there are, how many and what kind of brands (top brands, B-brands, unbranded or private label), and what kind of sellers. And you look at the quality of that supply through the reviews. At the market potential stage you don't dive into every individual review yet, but you do want to quickly see the scores across the whole market: are the existing products rated well, or are there a lot of complaints, meaning there's room for someone who does it better? We explain the kinds of sellers and brands you'll encounter on bol in the framework for product research on bol.

Steps 2 to 5: from analysis to profit

If there's potential in the market, the funnel narrows and you go deeper:

• Market analysis. Now you want to really understand the market. Which products generate revenue, what kind of players are there, and are there private label sellers like the one you want to become? You also get an initial picture of the products themselves, for example their dimensions, so you can assess whether they fit your budget: with a small starting capital, you'd rather not start with large, expensive products. And you check whether entering is still realistic: have new players recently achieved sales and reviews, or does everything go to the established top players? How to do this is covered in market analysis: is there room for a new player.
• Distinctiveness. If you can enter, you look at how you can be different. You look at which specifications are currently offered and where the money is made, and you use the reviews to see where existing products fall short. That's how you find the gap where your product can really add something.
• Launch strategy. Once you know what you're going to offer, you think about the launch: which keywords do you want to be found for, and what will advertising cost? You usually advertise more at the start to get things going, and scale that back afterwards. You want to already estimate now whether you can afford that and whether you can sell profitably in the long run.
• Profit. The last step, and also the most time-consuming: you fully calculate the profit and start looking for suppliers. You deliberately do this only at the end, once a niche has passed all seven previous filters.

This is the core of good product research: start broad, quickly rule out what won't work, and only dig progressively deeper into the promising niches.

Same start, a different turn

Start the same research with MarktMentor and with Rylee at the same time, and you'll quickly see where they diverge.

As far as publicly observable, Rylee has two core features for product research: a product database and a Chrome extension. With the database you search for products, with the extension you read off estimates on the bol page itself. Handy for looking at a single product. But as soon as you try to follow the funnel, it turns out those two features don't get you in at the start, but somewhere in the middle.

Why you already get stuck at step 1 with Rylee

The first step is market potential, and for that you need to be able to see the market as a whole: not one product, but all the products of a niche combined, so you get the bigger picture. And that's exactly where it gets stuck.

Look at sales, and Rylee works with ranges: not "the estimate is this," but "between 10 and 25," or "between 25 and 75." For a single product, a range like that can give a reasonable impression. But ranges can't be added together. Want to combine the revenue and sales of an entire niche to see how big the market is? The uncertainty stacks up and you're left without a usable overall picture. You can use it to look at a product, but not at the market around it. On top of that, indicators like impressions, which you need for categories, are missing from that kind of setup.

That leaves you stuck with individual products, and that's exactly the trap many beginning sellers fall into. They start with a single product, stare themselves blind on it, and assume that one product is the whole market. That's not how it works, and precisely because a product database pulls you towards that one product, there's a good chance you'll make the same mistake. On the funnel, you then don't start at market potential, but fall back on product-level distinctiveness, while skipping the most important question: is this market even worth it in the first place.

How you do it right with the niche explorer

To research market potential at market level, MarktMentor uses the niche explorer. That's a filterable keyword database with bol's relevant keywords, in which each keyword is enriched with extra data. In one table you see, per keyword, the total revenue of the products behind it, the average price, the search volume, the competition level, the dominant category, the average winning bid and the seasonality. Those are exactly the demand and supply indicators from step 1, brought together in one place.

That's how you work from broad to narrow. For example, you first filter by price range, because the selling price determines how much starting capital you need, and then narrow down the revenue, search volume and number of competitors until you're left with a short, assessable list. From the table you click through to the niche details, where charts show market value, sales and search volume over time, so you can tell a growth trend apart from a seasonal peak or a hype. And you read the supply: how many products, brands and sellers, what share is unbranded and how much bol offers itself. That's a complete picture of an entire niche, all added up, and it's the step you can't take with individual product estimates. The full method is in product research through keywords with the niche explorer.

In short: where a product database with ranges leaves you stuck at step 1, the niche explorer lets you complete that step in full. And that difference carries through the entire funnel, because every following step builds on this first one.

Market analysis: the product radar versus a saved list

Once the niche explorer shows a niche has potential, you move on to deeper analysis. For that you use the product radar. You collect the products of a niche and give them labels, and based on those labels you build analyses across the whole market instead of per individual product. That way you can see, for example, what share of revenue goes to private label brands and what share to established brands, how the pie is divided, and which players are strongest. Those are the insights you need to assess whether there's really room for a new player. The special thing is that you can complete the entire rest of the research from the radar: every step that comes after, you carry out from the same place. We show how that works in market analysis: is there room for a new player.

As far as publicly observable, Rylee does have a way to track products, but that essentially comes down to a saved list of products. That's something different from dissecting the market. The analyses you get automatically in the radar, such as the ratio of private label to established brands, you'd have to build manually in a spreadsheet. That's possible, but it takes a lot of time, and the question is whether you want to spend that time putting things side by side yourself, or whether you want to reach your conclusions quickly and automatically.

And the rest of the funnel?

The final steps also continue in the same environment. For distinctiveness you use the review analysis to see where existing products fall short. For the launch you find the relevant keywords in the keyword guide and see where competitors stand, and you estimate your advertising costs using the average winning bid. And you calculate profit down to product level with the profit calculator. The point isn't that every individual feature is unique, but that you go through the entire funnel, from market potential to profit, as one connected process. That's exactly what a product database with an extension doesn't offer.

The difference is in the approach, not the price

Put both methods side by side and you see two different ways of working. One lets you read the market as a whole and work from broad to deep; the other keeps you stuck on individual products and effectively lets you skip the first step.

What makes this extra clear: getting started costs about the same either way. For product research, MarktMentor and Rylee start at a comparable level, so this isn't a choice between cheap and expensive. Rylee mainly positions itself as the budget option; the difference isn't in what you pay, but in how far you get: at a single product, or across the entire market.

In short

• Good product research is a funnel: market potential first, then market analysis, distinctiveness, launch and profit. Start broad, quickly rule out what won't work, only dig deeper into promising niches.
• You assess market potential across the entire market: demand (search volume, impressions, revenue, sales) and supply (numbers, kinds of brands and sellers, reviews).
• For product research, Rylee works with a product database and an extension, and gives estimates in ranges. Handy per product, but not addable into a market picture, so you already get stuck at step 1.
• With the niche explorer you do research market potential at market level, and with the product radar you dissect the whole market during market analysis and complete the research.
• Getting started costs roughly the same for both. The difference is in the approach and the depth, not the price.

Product research is one of the things you need to master to succeed on bol. The complete overview is in what you need to be able to do to succeed on bol.

Read more:

• The framework for product research on bol
• Product research through keywords with the niche explorer
• Market analysis: is there room for a new player?

Compare MarktMentor and Rylee per feature

• MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you grow profitably on bol?
• MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you measure your findability on bol?
• MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you optimise your listing on bol?
• MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you advertise on bol?

The comparison with Rylee is based on publicly observable information at the time of writing.