Interview with bol.com, Benelux’s largest online marketplace

Hi, yes, of course! I’ve been working at bol.com for nearly three years. I started out as Market Manager for Electronics, then as of 2021 became the Business Development Manager for France. My aim is to select a small number of high-quality French sellers to expand our line of products and improve prices for our 12 million customers. Each country (Germany, Spain and other European countries) has its own Business Development Manager with the same aims as mine for their particular market.

bol.com is the largest domestic marketplace in the Netherlands and Belgium, with more than 34 million products, most of which are from non-food categories. These include fast-moving consumer goods, books, household appliances and high-tech products, home and garden items, fashion etc. We have 12 million customers, 140 million monthly visitors and 47,000 active sellers on our marketplace. We are the major stakeholder in our market, with a domestic market penetration of more than 60%.** But what makes us stand out is the personalised service we offer to both our customers and sellers, with account managers, individual growth plans, and more. And we don’t charge registration or subscription fees.

We are a domestic marketplace with domestic consumers, and local expertise is very important to us. At the same time, so we can offer our customers a complete and competitive range of products, we aim to partner with a few select quality European sellers from beyond Belgium and the Netherlands. So there is a small selection of ‘international’ sellers. For this reason, those sellers who wish to join our platform must meet certain requirements, which are:

• Proven marketplace experience with over one million euros in revenues on one platform in one year
• Use of a product feed management company such as Lengow
• Provision of customer service in Dutch
• Demonstrable seller quality with more than 80% positive customer reviews
• Offer free returns within 30 days service

• bol.com is the entry point into the Dutch and Belgian markets. Contact us if you are interested and we will see what we can do for you.
• If you can show us positive customer reviews and first-class customer service, you’ll find success on our platform!
• Our top sellers use our ‘Sponsored Products’ service. With this service, you can reach visitors at various buying stages, on multiple devices, by listing your products in sponsored product ads. bol.com offers its sellers the possibility to participate in events such as Black Friday, sales and other deals. The higher your performance during the year, the higher your products will rank on high-traffic web pages during our promotional events.

* Source: RetailX, drawing on data from Eurostat, 2021

** Source: Analysis by Consultancy.nl, Nederlands Online Bereik Onderzoek (NOBO), SVDJ, Similarweb, 2020