Bol Pulls Further Ahead of Amazon in the Dutch E-commerce Market

Bol has strengthened its position as the largest online retailer in the Netherlands, widening its lead over Amazon despite the American e-commerce giant continuing to invest in the Dutch market.

According to new estimates from ECDB, Dutch consumers spent €5.81 billion through Bol in 2025, up 12% from €5.19 billion a year earlier. Spending through Amazon.nl reached €3.31 billion, up just 2.7%.

That means Bol’s merchandise volume was more than 75% higher than Amazon.nl’s last year. In 2024, the gap was around 61%.

The result is particularly notable because the previous year’s data suggested Amazon was closing the gap. Instead, Bol accelerated while Amazon’s Dutch growth slowed.

For European e-commerce, it is another reminder that global scale does not automatically translate into local market leadership.

A Local Marketplace Defends Its Home Market

Amazon launched its full Dutch marketplace in March 2020, entering a country where Bol had already spent years building its position.

Today, Amazon has considerable reach. It reported around 6.4 million monthly users in the Netherlands during the second half of 2025, including visitors to Amazon.nl and international Amazon sites. The company is also investing more than €1.4 billion in the Netherlands over three years.

Yet Bol continues to outperform it in merchandise volume.

One reason may be that Bol has developed far beyond its origins as an online store. It now operates a marketplace for tens of thousands of sales partners while offering services around logistics, advertising, payments and delivery.

That creates an ecosystem in which the platform does not need to sell every product itself. Third-party merchants can expand the assortment while Bol provides much of the infrastructure surrounding the transaction.

Amazon pioneered much of this marketplace model globally. In the Netherlands, however, Bol has shown that a local platform can apply a similar strategy while maintaining a strong connection with its domestic market.

The Battle Is Increasingly About Assortment

Both companies are now working to broaden the selection available to Dutch shoppers.

Bol has been recruiting international sellers, including merchants from outside the European Union. Amazon, meanwhile, recently expanded its Pan-European FBA requirements. Since September 3, sellers participating in Pan-EU FBA must have active Dutch offers for all eligible new and existing products.

The result is likely to be more international inventory on both marketplaces.

Bol’s growth also comes as another international competitor gains ground. AliExpress moved into third place in ECDB’s Dutch ranking, with estimated merchandise volume rising 13.3% to €1.81 billion in 2025. Coolblue followed at €1.74 billion.

Dutch e-commerce is therefore not becoming less competitive, even as Bol remains number one. Its leading marketplace is facing Amazon from one direction and fast-growing Asian platforms from another.

Assortment becomes one of the key battlegrounds.

More Sellers Mean a Bigger Catalog Challenge

For marketplaces, adding merchants can quickly expand product selection. It also creates a less visible challenge: integrating the product information those merchants bring.

Thousands of sellers may describe similar products differently. Attributes can be missing, categories may not match, identifiers can be inconsistent and images or descriptions can vary significantly in quality.

International sellers add languages, local requirements and different catalog structures to the equation.

At marketplace scale, product onboarding therefore becomes more than simply allowing another merchant to open an account. The platform needs to turn information from many different sources into a catalog customers can search, filter, and compare.

This is where the development is particularly relevant to Icecat.

Standardized product information gives marketplaces and their selling partners a common foundation of identifiers, specifications, descriptions, images, and other attributes. Instead of recreating the same product content independently for every seller and channel, sellers can reuse and distribute existing structured product records across the e-commerce ecosystem.

That becomes increasingly valuable as marketplaces compete by expanding their assortments.

Marketplace Competition Is Also Infrastructure Competition

Price and product selection remain highly visible parts of the competition between Bol and Amazon, but sellers also have to decide which platforms make economic and operational sense.

Fees are only one part of that decision. Logistics, advertising, payments, customer reach and the ease of managing a catalog can all influence where merchants choose to sell.

That makes marketplace competition partly a contest over infrastructure.

The platform that makes it easier for merchants to add products, maintain accurate listings, fulfill orders, and reach customers can potentially attract more sellers. More sellers can create a larger assortment, which in turn makes the marketplace more useful to consumers.

It is a reinforcing cycle, but only if the underlying systems can handle the additional scale.

Local Strength Still Matters in European Ecommerce

Amazon remains Europe’s largest marketplace overall, and marketplaces accounted for almost 61% of European e-commerce GMV in 2025. But the Dutch market shows that e-commerce leadership can still be highly local.

Bol operates only in the Netherlands and Belgium, yet in its home market it has increased rather than surrendered its lead over one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies.

The next phase of that competition will involve more than attracting shoppers. Both platforms are expanding their seller ecosystems and international assortments, while competitors such as AliExpress are growing quickly.

As that happens, the ability to turn thousands of merchants and millions of listings into a coherent product catalog becomes increasingly important.

For marketplaces, scale is valuable. But scale works best when customers can still understand what they are buying.