Bol.com

What do you need to be able to do to succeed on bol?

Lars Hurkmans·Co-founder·8 July 2026·Temps de lecture 10 minutes

To succeed on bol you need to master seven things: understanding the market, becoming findable through SEO and advertising, monitoring your positions, tracking your market share, using reviews, calculating your real profitability and automating your processes. Bol is a marketplace, so you compete directly with other sellers for the same customer.

This article is an overview of everything involved in selling successfully on bol, from market research to profit optimisation. We walk through the seven competencies you need, explain why each one matters, and show which data belongs with it and how you get that through MarktMentor. If you're still right at the start, first read getting started selling on bol and how you reach your first 1,000 euros in revenue.

Why is succeeding on bol a data question?

Succeeding on bol starts with data, because bol is a marketplace. You compete directly with other sellers, often with the same kinds of products, and customers compare them in seconds on price, reviews and delivery time. Whether you get seen at all depends on how well you score in the search results. Without the right data and insights, you're steering blind.

The questions you run into along the way are always the same:

• Is there potential for my products on bol, or is there room for growth?
• Does the assortment I don't yet offer match what's in demand on bol?
• Where are the expansion opportunities for my assortment?
• How do I improve my findability?
• How do I grow my market share?
• Am I even earning enough by selling on bol?

Each of those questions can be answered with the right data. The rest of this article walks through the seven competencies you need for that, in the order you encounter them: from market research to profit optimisation.

How do you understand how the market works on bol?

You understand the market through three perspectives on the same market data: categories, keywords and products. Each perspective gives different insights, and together they give a complete picture of how the market is put together. You don't need a bol store for this yet; you can fully explore the market before deciding to start selling.

Categories give you a well-defined overview of the markets and niches on bol. For this you use the Panorama within MarktMentor, a filterable database of all of bol's subcategories. Per category you see the market value in euros, so how much money changes hands, and with it the size of the market. What makes categories unique are the benchmarks you only see at this level: the conversion rate (how many visitors actually buy) and the return rate, both of which vary a lot per product group. You also see which brands, products and specifications sell best, and whether the market is growing, stable or shrinking. That way you quickly determine whether a market is interesting enough, saturated or fragmented, and whether it's a seasonal product, a hype or an evergreen. More on this in how the bol market works and market research on bol.

Keywords give you insight into consumer behaviour: what people search for on bol. This perspective is less clearly defined than categories and revolves around search intent. Within MarktMentor you use the keyword guide for this. It shows, per keyword, the monthly search volume, the market value of the products sold around it, and the competition: how many sellers are visible and what the average advertising cost is. You won't see conversion and return figures here, those belong with categories, but you do get the most relevant categories per keyword, so you know which product types consumers mean. How to research this step by step is covered in product research through keywords.

Products form the most specific level: the sales performance of individual products. You use this when you want to know how much a specific product sells, how much demand there is for it, and who the sellers are at buy box level. MarktMentor has three tools for this. The product database contains bol's relevant products with estimated sales and revenue, historical buy box price, price developments and detailed listing information, including changes. The Chrome extension gives you that information while you browse bol, handy for quick product research. And with the product radar you bundle self-chosen product groups to track them in one overview, ideal for monitoring competitors. The complete step-by-step plan for this is in the framework for product research, and for the product choice itself in in-depth specification research.

How do you become findable on bol?

You become findable by optimising your listing for the right keywords and advertising in a targeted way where needed. Bol works like a search engine: customers type what they're looking for and get results, just like on Google. That's why both SEO and SEA are relevant, and you need to know which keywords you want to be found for and how to score well on them. The basics of this are covered in findability on bol.

To find the right keywords you use the keyword guide within MarktMentor, in two ways. With the first, you enter a product group or term and get relevant keywords with their monthly data: the search volume, the average number of impressions, and the search volume divided by the number of competitors (views per listing). The keyword guide also shows how much you need to sell to be found organically, and which categories matter most for a keyword. The second way is the reverse EAN search method: you enter a specific product, for example from a competitor, and see which keywords it's found under, what organic positions it scores, how many impressions it gets, and whether it's a short-tail or long-tail keyword. That's useful for competitor analysis: you see which SEO strategy a competitor follows and can apply it to your own listing.

Alongside organic findability, advertising is becoming increasingly important, especially when launching a new product. That's why you want to know what it costs to advertise on certain keywords. You estimate that with the average winning bid: that tells you where advertising makes sense and where it doesn't. How advertising on bol works is covered in bol's advertising system; what it costs at a launch is covered in advertising costs at a launch.

Once you have your keywords, you build a listing that converts and scores well within bol's algorithm. For this there's the listing optimiser, which creates product titles and descriptions within bol's guidelines and uses the keywords from the keyword guide. A listing shouldn't just be found well, it also needs to convince the customer the moment they see it.

How do you monitor your positions on bol?

You monitor your positions by tracking which keywords you appear under and at what position. Findability is the first step in the customer journey: if a consumer doesn't see your product, they can't buy it either. According to this article, on average about 80% of consumers don't look beyond the first page. Take that as a rough guide, not an exact cutoff; your organic position matters regardless.

Once you connect your bol store to MarktMentor, the My Rankings tool gives you insight into your findability. You see retroactively which keywords you're found under, what your current positions are and how they develop over time. My Rankings is essentially a filterable findability database for your entire assortment: you sort and filter on KPIs such as which products are found best, where you're rising and where you're losing ground, and which keywords actually deliver you traffic. That's especially useful with a large assortment, where you want to quickly see where your attention needs to go.

To see how well you're scoring relative to what's achievable, we introduced the Share of Voice KPI. Share of Voice measures your total reach against what you could have achieved, so you see right away where you need to adjust course. That also helps your advertising strategy: if you already score well organically on a keyword, you might not need to advertise on it, and if you score poorly, that's often exactly the moment to. That way you deploy your advertising budget in a targeted way.

How do you track your market share on bol?

You track your market share by combining your own sales data with the total market value per category. The market share tool in MarktMentor does that and calculates your market share per category, sorted from high to low, and you can also view that per brand in your assortment. That way you see at a glance where you're most relevant.

The development over time is at least as important: is your market share growing or are you losing ground, and are there competitors who just entered and are taking share from you? Those are signals to act on. The tool also shows which products are your top sellers and therefore responsible for the share you achieve. That lets you make strategic choices about where to focus and steer your assortment at scale.

How do you make use of reviews on bol?

You make use of reviews by collecting them automatically and analysing them for patterns, instead of manually going through your listings. The customer feedback tool in MarktMentor automatically gives you insight into the reviews across your entire assortment, so you don't have to check bol every day. That way you see what customers see as the strengths of your products and where they run into problems. By monitoring that and assessing it critically, you improve your assortment. How to also use reviews before a launch to find distinctiveness is covered in finding distinctiveness through reviews.

How do you calculate your real profitability on bol?

You calculate your real profitability by including all the costs between revenue and profit, not just the revenue from your bol dashboard. This is where many sellers get caught off guard: based on revenue, a product seems to be doing well, while after all the costs there's little or nothing left, or even a loss. MarktMentor makes the five main cost components visible for this:

• Sales costs. What you pay for the product yourself, in other words the product costs. You set these per product or in bulk.
• Shipping costs. These differ a lot per product and fulfilment method. MarktMentor calculates them automatically based on dimensions and weight, and takes your fulfilment type into account: Shipped by bol (LVB), Send via bol or your own shipping.
• Commission. The commission bol charges per order, retrieved automatically, including commission discounts, for example if you take part in a bol promotion.
• Advertising costs. The costs of your sponsored products, plus any storage costs if you use LVB.
• Return costs. Not just the label costs, but also the costs of replacement products and the consequences of products going back into stock.

With those costs, MarktMentor calculates your real net margin per product. You get your assortment sorted by profitability, so you see which products are cash cows and which run at a loss. At the overall level you see your profit and loss statement per period, with all costs subtracted and your profit margin in percentages, and you can filter by period, category and country. That way you know where your profit comes from and where you're losing money, and you can decide to adjust a price, stop a structurally loss-making product, or advertise less on products with a low margin. The gap between thinking you're making a profit and knowing what your real profit is can be large.

If you want to calculate profitability before purchasing, calculating profitability before launch will help; for knowing your costs and margin once you're already selling, see which costs determine your profitability.

How do you automate your processes on bol?

Alongside the analytical tools, MarktMentor lets you automate a number of recurring tasks. You can automatically upload invoices to bol for every order, saving manual work and errors on invoice requests. You can automatically send a review request after an order, within bol's guidelines, so you get more reviews, which can benefit conversion. You'll find all your orders in one place, with the ability to check statuses, returns and handling status. And if you have multiple bol accounts or stores, you connect them all and manage everything from one environment. These aren't the most critical components, but they do save time on a daily basis.

Summary: what do you need to be able to do to succeed on bol?

To succeed on bol you master seven things, in this order:

• Understanding the market through three perspectives: categories (Panorama), keywords (keyword guide) and products (product database, Chrome extension, product radar).
• Becoming findable with the right keywords (keyword guide), an optimised listing (listing optimiser) and targeted advertising, estimated via the average winning bid.
• Monitoring your positions with My Rankings and the Share of Voice KPI.
• Tracking your market share per category and per brand, and its development over time.
• Making use of reviews by collecting them automatically and analysing them for patterns.
• Calculating your profitability with the five cost components, down to your real net margin per product.
• Automating your processes, from invoices to review requests and multiple stores.

That's the route this article follows: from market research, through findability and market share, to your profit. You get that data and those insights with MarktMentor. You can already explore the market on bol without a bol store, and there's a free 14-day trial with no credit card required; prices start from 29 euros a month and are cancellable monthly.