The Dutch bol platform is about to close the sales channel for individual sellers

According to foreign media reports, the Dutch e-commerce platform bol recently announced that from May 3, 2021 , it will stop opening sales channels to individuals , and the platform will only be open to professional sellers .

At that time, individuals will not be allowed to sell second-hand books, music, movies and other products on the platform . This means that the C2C business of the bol platform will be suspended.

According to Bol, the decision stems from the success of the marketplace feature that was precisely developed by these private sellers. Now that both professional and individual sellers, big and small, are using this feature, the expectations of these groups are starting to diverge.

Businesses and private sellers require different features that no longer fit into the same sales account. Since these services are so different from each other and business sales are the focus, the bol platform decided to focus only on developing business sales opportunities. It is reported that nearly 60% of the products on bol.com are sold by business sales partners.

At present , the platform does not know how many individuals are actively selling on bol.com. It is reported that in 2014 , there were hundreds of thousands of people in total , and only 5,000 professionals , which has now increased to a little over 40,000.

Until the beginning of 2007, bol.com was a "normal" web store where the company decided on the offer . From April 2007 , individuals could place second-hand books on the shelves next to new books. Four years later, in 2011, the company decided to allow professional traders access to its trading platform. Since then, the product range of third parties has been closely linked to their own.

In the past year, with the rapid development of e-commerce in the Netherlands, Bol.com has achieved its most brilliant "achievement". The latest data from Ahold Delhaize shows that in the fourth quarter of last year, Bol.com's revenue increased by 69.9%. In the same period, Bol.com's third-party seller sales increased by 110%, and there are more than 41,000 trading partners on the platform.

In 2020, Ahold Delhaize generated online sales of 7.6 billion euros, of which Bol.com accounted for 4.3 billion euros. This exceeded the company's target of 3.5 billion euros set a year in advance.

“With the increased production capacity and continued momentum, we are now on track to achieve our new target of generating at least €5 billion in online consumer sales at Bol.com,” Ahold Delhaize said.

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