Benelux’s leading marketplace Bol.com now has 50,000 partner sellers. The past three years the number of merchants almost doubled. Partners are responsible for 60 percent of the platform’s revenue in the first quarter of 2022. The growth in sellers is slowing down after the pandemic, though.
Bol.com, the Dutch competitor for Amazon, started selling through partners in 2011. One third of all partners currently uses Bol.com’s fulfillment service. The ecommerce platform expects this to grow to a whopping 90 percent by 2025. But the growth in partners is slowing down after the pandemic.
‘Number of sellers almost doubled in 3 years’
Bol.com now consists of 50,000 third-party sellers. This number has grown significantly over the last few years: in three years time the amount of merchants almost doubled. The largest increase took place in 2020, when 10,000 partners joined.
In 2020, 10,000 partners joined the platform.
41 million products
Nearly all third-party merchants are located in the Netherlands and Belgium, according to Bol.com, aside from a handful from elsewhere in the European Union. Partly thanks to sellers, Bol.com now offers 41 million products in ‘dozens of categories’.
Bol.com currently has 13 million Dutch and Belgian customers.
During peak year 2020, the product range grew with 12 million items, an increase of 42 percent. The currently platform has 13 million Dutch and Belgian customers.
Partner growth slows down after 2020
Although 8,000 partners joined between April and September of 2020, the growth slowed down over the same period in 2021 with just 2,000 new merchants. Between 2021 and 2022 less partners have joined. The question is whether the growth continues after the peak during the pandemic. Still, Bol.com expects continued growth and is doubling their warehouse space accordingly.