Boloo (Zoloo) alternative 2026: features & pricing

Product research on bol: where do you start?

With the market, not with a product. A product that looks attractive on its own can sit in a market that is already saturated. That is why you first assess whether a niche has room, and only then narrow down to a single product.

Both platforms have something for that first step. At MarktMentor you search a database of millions of products with sales estimates, price development, reviews and visibility; Zoloo has a comparable database. A niche explorer and a profit calculator are also available on both sides.

The difference starts with the number of angles. MarktMentor links categories, keywords and products to each other, so you start with a keyword, see which products sell on it, zoom in on the reviews and keep track of your selection. If you also sell in Belgium, you can put the product data from both countries side by side.

Market research: is there room in the niche?

You assess that on demand versus supply. The Niche Explorer is built for this: a filterable database of keywords and categories in which you search by demand, competition and seasonal pattern. That way you first assess whether a market has room, and only then which product fits into it.

You can also look at that development over time, from the past month to the past year. A niche that looks quiet today may have just had a seasonal peak, and a niche that looks busy may be past its high point. Without that view over time, you judge a market on a single snapshot.

Competitor analysis on your own product selection

You now have a set of candidates, and that is exactly where most tools stop. You can save and track products, but you have to work out in a spreadsheet yourself what that set tells you.

In the Product Radar your selection is the starting point of the analysis instead of the end point. You decide how to divide it, by brand, price range, pack size, age or delivery time, with boundaries you choose rather than fixed bands. On each cross-section you run the same analyses: how the reviews are distributed and where customers run into problems, how the trend is developing, where you are visible, who wins the buy box and at what price and delivery time, and how likely it is that a newcomer can still get in here.

That changes the question you ask. No longer how one product is doing, but in which part of this market there is still room and why. Zoloo has a Product Tracker to save and follow products, but these kinds of cross-sections and analyses are not part of it: there you follow products, here you take a market apart.

Market share analyses: where do you stand in the market?

You can read that from three things: where you are found, how large your share of the market is, and how your conversion compares to your category. Zoloo gives insight into your current findability. MarktMentor adds market share and a conversion comparison to that, so you see not only what you are doing yourself but also how that compares to the rest of your category.

Findability on bol: where do you stand now?

80% of consumers on bol do not look beyond the first page. Where you rank is therefore not a detail. For this, Zoloo has the Ranking Checker, which shows which keywords a product is found on. That approach does have its limits:

• Positions are only tracked after you have added keywords yourself, so you wait several weeks for usable insights.
• You specify yourself which keywords you want to track. Keywords on which you are visible without knowing it therefore stay out of view.
• The number of keywords per product is capped, while a product can be visible on tens to hundreds of keywords.
• Adding keywords manually per product takes time, and that time grows with the size of your range.
• The tool tracks keywords, not category positions.

MarktMentor works the other way round. We automatically track which keywords millions of products on bol are visible for, so the data is already there as soon as you sign up and you do not maintain your own keyword list. Alongside your keyword positions we track your category positions, and sponsored positions are marked separately from organic ones.

And it is not only about your own range. Because we track those positions for millions of products, you can just as easily see which keywords your competitors are found on and where they are rising or falling. That way you see which terms they already hold and where there is still room, instead of only knowing this about your own products.

What you can do with it afterwards is the real difference. Per product you see your share of voice: the share of the search volume on your active keywords that you actually capture as impressions. You can sort by the biggest risers and fallers over 7, 30 or 90 days, which turns the list into an alert system instead of a scoreboard. And you see when a position is inherited from another product in the same product family, so you do not mistake a family position for a position measured on your own EAN.

Another difference that only stands out once you start advertising: we separate your organic positions from your sponsored visibility. If you see position 5 in a combined figure, you do not know whether you built that spot yourself or are buying it. For the question of whether you can scale back an ad, that is exactly the figure you need.

Your market share per category

You only know that once you put your revenue next to the size of the market. MarktMentor calculates your market share per category on bol, and how that share develops over time.

Without that comparison, a revenue figure is a number without a yardstick. The same growth can be good news in a shrinking category and disappointing in a category that is growing much faster.

Conversion against your category benchmark

You only know that once you compare your conversion with the benchmark of your category. MarktMentor puts those two side by side per product, so you see which products perform above the market and which fall below it.

That distinction determines your next step. If a product falls below the benchmark, there is usually something to gain in the listing or the price. If it already performs above the market, scaling up your ads usually delivers more than optimising further.

Advertising on bol: insight or execution too?

Both platforms give you ad insights. Zoloo keeps to the basics: a dashboard with impressions, CTR, ACOS and ROAS, and your ad costs in your profit. That shows you how your campaigns are doing.

In MarktMentor you also manage your campaigns, and the system does work for you. You choose a goal and it adjusts your bids.

That is exactly the difference. A strategy knows the phase of your product, from collecting data and launching to growing organically and optimising, and adjusts the bidding policy to it. Rulesets and dayparting do the rest: bid high when people are buying, low when they are only browsing. With the bulk editor you roll that out across your whole store instead of campaign by campaign.

Because your organic positions and your category benchmarks are in the same platform, the system can scale back paid where you are already strong organically. With only a dashboard, you make that trade-off yourself every week.

Store management: emails and invoices automated

That is where most time leaks away. In MarktMentor you manage your range and stock in one place, with purchase prices, low-stock warnings and a calculation of how many days of stock you have left. Customer Invoices are generated automatically, uploaded to bol and sent to business customers via Peppol.

Your VAT return on your bol revenue also takes more time than necessary, especially if you sell in several countries or at several VAT rates. In the VAT invoices you see per quarter your output VAT broken down by country and by rate, your deductible VAT per cost group such as commission and fulfilment, and the balance between them. We calculate that breakdown from the orders behind your bol invoices. Per invoice you see the source data and whether the data is complete, and you export the whole calculation for your accountant.

Invoices count towards the year and quarter of their issue date and not of the invoice period. That determines in which quarter an amount lands, and therefore whether your figures match the period you are filing your return for. Always have your VAT return checked by your accountant.

On the customer side, the review insights show your NPS and review scores across your whole range. But a score does not tell you what to change. That is why we extract the aspects from the review texts themselves: which strengths customers consistently mention, and where they keep running into problems. You can filter on such an aspect, and compare your own scores with those of comparable products. That turns "this product gets a 3.8" into a concrete pointer to what you need to change in the product or the listing.

With email campaigns you ask for reviews in a fair, neutral way, within the rules bol sets for this. You choose the moment, for example a number of days after delivery, and Dutch and French-speaking customers automatically get the right language.

How a growing bol seller approaches this

In our documentary you follow TLS Commerce, the company behind top 50 brand Nuvance, from its first product research to €5 million in revenue on bol. You see which decisions they made, which data they based them on, and where things went wrong along the way.