-header.png)
Bol.com partner, or partner from Amazon? Part 1
Partner of Bol.com or Partner of Amazon, those titles make quiet an impression, right! You are absolutely right, and did you know that e-commerce is not even that difficult? Earn extra money by packing products for a few hours a day and taking them to your nearest drop off point, or what about outsourcing the delivery and packaging? Everything is possible, and you make the choices! Below we explain what you need to know before you start your successful ecommerce journey.
Amazon or Bol.com marketplaces, or rather your own shop?
You must have looked into ecommerce quite a lot to end up here on this page. So first of all: Well done! Orientation is the most important education in making your strategic choices. Do you opt for convenience but commission, or for more profit but more work? Those are the trade-offs you make when you consider choosing Bol, Amazon, Shopify or Ecwid.
When you start off, all parts of e-commerce seem like a lot: being able to code, understand statistics for your ads, where do you buy your products, marketing your products and of course customer service. It doesn't seem to stop!
That is why starting as a seller on Bol.com is a good first step. They take over the marketing from you, because let's face it: everybody in the Netherlands buys online on Bol! In addition, they help you set up your own web shop. Simple and easy. So you spend all your attention on making sales, packaging and your accounting.
Start selling on Bol.com
The big advantage is the simplicity of the platform. You check your sales every afternoon, wrap them up and bring them away. If the sales get too many per day, you could hire a fulfillment center to do this job for you. This brings you extra costs, but has the advantage that you can grow even faster. Bol.com, therefore, also offers LVB options located in the Netherlands. This Delivery Via Bol (LVB) option is an in-house system from Bol.com to make your life easier.
Although we would recommend, as long as there are not more than 20 products per day, it should be manageable to store inventory and boxing products from your own garage. Every day you walk with a grocery bag or little carriage to the nearest drop-off points and you have had your daily exercise right away too. And yes, also when it rains!
Start selling on Amazon
Selling on Amazon is a little more difficult for a beginner. The process of becoming an Amazon seller is simply more difficult than Bol.com. For a beginner, it is admittedly a difficult trade-off: access to 15 million visitors, or access to 300 million visitors! However, the tradeoff is worth it.
Of course there are also disadvantages to Bol.com where Amazon does better. The professionalism of Amazon, among other things, is why they are the largest worldwide. Amazon has a stricter admission process, which means that the quality of the products and the sellers is higher than on Bol.com. The sanctions on Amazon are also stricter. This has to do with the number of sellers on both platforms. About 40,000 sellers are active on Bol.com, although some say up to 150,000. Still, Amazon has about 10 million sellers, which makes the difference rather insignificant. This difference seems more positive for Bol.com, because there is less competition there. But we must not forget that the market for Bol.com is also much smaller.
Want to know more about the differences between Bol.com and Amazon as sellers?