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MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you grow profitably on bol?

Lars Hurkmans·Co-founder·22 July 2026·Temps de lecture 5 minutes

Growing profitably on bol is two things: knowing what you really keep (your net margin after all five costs), and knowing whether that is good (your numbers next to the market: your conversion against the benchmark and your market share). MarktMentor calculates your profit down to product level and puts your performance in context. A tool that only passes on your own numbers, such as Rylee, leaves you without that context, and so you make decisions on half the information.

Growing on bol is not the same as growing profitably. Your revenue can rise while your margin evaporates, and a product that sells a lot can still be a small player in its market. To know whether you are doing well, you therefore need to be able to answer two questions: what do I really keep, and how do I compare to the market? The first question is about your costs, the second about context.

Why does your profit on bol look higher than it is?

Because most sellers count the visible costs and forget the rest. Selling price minus purchase price feels like profit, but on bol you pay five cost components per product, and they differ per product, per category and per shipping method. If you leave a few of them out, your margin looks healthy while you are actually losing money at the bottom line.

The cost item that is most often underestimated is the return. A return costs you not only the return shipping, but also the refund, sometimes a product that can no longer be sold, and restocking. In some categories more than 1 in 7 sales comes back. If you do not factor that in, you quickly make a loss on such products without seeing it. The full explanation is in profitability on bol: which costs you need to include.

Which five costs do you calculate?

1. Purchase and shipping to your customer.
2. The bol commission, which differs per category.
3. Ad costs, because almost every product needs ads in the beginning.
4. Storage, especially with logistics via bol.
5. Returns, including refund and restocking.

Only when these five are in view do you know what a product really earns. How to include the advertising side in your margin is covered in launching a product and the ad costs on bol.

How does MarktMentor calculate that for you?

With the Profit Calculator, automatically based on your connected bol store. You do not have to look up commissions or shipping costs manually: they are loaded in. You enter your purchase value per product yourself, and the calculator works out all five costs. Per product you see what you keep net, sorted from most to least profitable, so you see at a glance which products are your money makers and which cost you money.

You can also do this before purchasing. Enter the selling price, shipping method and an expected return rate, and you see your net margin before you spend a euro. That turns the profit calculation into a decision-making tool, not a surprise afterwards. The background is in calculating profitability for bol.

From product to store: the profit and loss statement

Individual product margins are half the story. At store level, MarktMentor gives a complete profit and loss statement per period: from gross revenue, via refunds to net revenue, and then past selling costs, return costs and ad costs to your net profit. Every line is visible, so you do not only see that your profit is falling, but what is causing it. How an active seller steers on this weekly is covered in analysing your bol store for profit and ROI.

Your numbers say little without the market next to them

Up to here you know what you earn. But a number on its own does not yet tell you whether you are doing well. For that you need to set your own numbers next to the market, and that is exactly the point where the difference between tools starts to count. Two kinds of context matter most here: your conversion against the benchmark, and your market share.

Set your conversion next to the benchmark

Your conversion, meaning how many of your visitors actually buy, only means something compared to your category. An example. Suppose your conversion looks low. Annoying, you think. But if the whole category converts just as low, you are actually simply performing average and there is little to worry about. The other way round just as much: a conversion you consider high can disappoint if the market is structurally even higher. Then you are quietly leaving sales on the table without realising it.

That is why MarktMentor compares your conversion with the benchmark of your category. If you are structurally above it, you convert above average and you are doing well; if you are below it, you know there is still something to gain. It is not about the bare number, but about where you stand relative to the rest, because that tells you whether your conversion is really good or whether there is room to improve.

What your market share tells you

The same goes for your revenue. Suppose a product does 5,000 euros in revenue. Sounds good. But if the whole market is so big that this is less than one percent of it, you are a marginal player and the chance that you will dominate that market is small. Now take another product that does 2,000 euros. Less interesting at first sight. But if that market is much smaller and you capture 5 or 10 percent of it, you are actually in a strong position there. In absolute terms you earn less, in relative terms you are doing much better. (Those numbers are an illustration, not a norm.)

That is what your Market Share tells you and your own revenue does not: what part of a market you really hold, whether that share is growing or shrinking, and whether you are becoming more visible than your competitors or actually losing ground. Only with that insight do you know which product to scale up and which one to let go, instead of blindly steering on the highest revenue.

Why Rylee stops here

Up to and including your own profit, a lighter tool gets you a long way. Rylee gives, as far as publicly observable, decent basic insight into what you earn. Where it stops is the context: setting your performance next to the market. And that is no coincidence, it lies in how such tools are built.

At its core, a lighter tool reads out the data that bol returns and puts it straight into a dashboard. For your own basic numbers that works fine, and MarktMentor does that just as well for those simple numbers. The difference is what sits behind it. MarktMentor has been collecting bol data in its own background system for years, and it is precisely that system that makes the context possible: conversion benchmarks per category, market shares, the proportions within a market. A tool that only passes on what comes in simply cannot make those comparisons. Not because it is bad, but because the system underneath is not built for it.

And that is exactly why it matters to you. Without that context you make decisions on half the information. You scale up a product that seems to generate a lot of revenue in absolute terms but barely plays a role in a saturated market, and you drop a product that actually holds a strong position in its own market. You think you need to turn left, when you should have gone straight ahead. The numbers were right, only the context was missing.

In terms of entry level, both sit at a comparable price point, so this is not a choice between cheap and expensive. Rylee positions itself mainly as a budget solution, and that fits a simpler setup: a system that neatly passes on your own numbers, but is not built to set them next to the market. For that same entry level, MarktMentor gives you that context on top: the benchmarks, your market share and the proportions in your market. If you want to know not only what you earn, but also whether that is good and where you can grow, that context is half the work.

In short

• Growing profitably is two things: knowing what you keep, and knowing whether that is good.
• Selling price minus purchase price is not profit. On bol you pay five types of cost per product, and returns are underestimated most often.
• The Profit Calculator works out all five automatically, per product and at store level, up to a complete profit and loss statement.
• Your conversion and your revenue only mean something next to the market: the conversion benchmark and your market share give the context to know whether you are performing well.
• Rylee gives you your own numbers, but not that context, because it mainly passes on bol's data and has no data system of its own underneath. Without context you steer on half the information.
• The entry level is priced comparably; the difference lies in context and depth, not in the monthly price.

Growing profitably 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:

• Calculating profitability for bol
• Analysing your bol store for profit and ROI
• How does the bol market work?

Compare MarktMentor and Rylee per feature

• MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you do product research 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.