Why brands fail: your listing tells no story
Open Bol.com. Search for any product. Phone holder, vitamin supplement, coffee machine, it doesn't matter. What you see is a wall of white backgrounds, generic product titles and images that all look the same. Dozens of sellers. The same photos. The same promises.
This is the reality for most brands on marketplaces. They upload their product, fill in the required fields, use the manufacturer's photos and wait for sales. And then comes the disappointment. Few clicks. Low conversion. The reflex: lower the price.
But price is rarely the problem. The problem is that your listing doesn't communicate.
A marketplace listing is a sales conversation held still. You have no salesperson to address the customer. No shop window to invite them in. No context to build trust. All you have is a row of images, a title and a description. Those elements have to tell the whole story.
And for most brands they tell nothing.
The main image is a blurry photo on a white background. The infographics are missing or crammed with text nobody reads. The title is a list of specifications without logic. The description reads like a translated manufacturer's text. There's no brand visible. No identity. No reason to choose.
That's not a listing problem. That's a brand problem. And it starts long before you upload your first product.
Poor visuals cost you more than you think
The customer on Bol.com or Amazon shops differently than on your own webshop. On your webshop the customer is already with you, they found you via Google, social or an ad. On a marketplace they're in a comparison environment. Your product next to the competitor's. Same screen. Same search result.
In that context the image decides. Not the price. Not the reviews. The image.
The guidelines in Amazon Seller Central are clear about one thing: the main image is the primary driver of click-through rate. Bol.com shares no official figures, but the pattern is identical. Customers scan search results visually. They click on what looks professional, what stands out, what inspires trust.
Poor visuals set off a chain reaction:
- Low click-through rate. Your product is shown but nobody clicks. The algorithm registers this. Fewer clicks means lower relevance, which means a lower position in search results.
- Low conversion. The people who do click see a listing without conviction. No infographics highlighting USPs. No lifestyle imagery placing the product in context. They hesitate and leave.
- Downward spiral. Lower conversion drives lower rankings, and lower rankings means less traffic (exactly how that mechanism works is explained in ranking higher on Bol.com). Less traffic forces you into advertising. Advertising at low conversion is money thrown away.
This isn't theory. We see it with every brand that comes to us asking "why isn't it selling?". The answer is almost always the same: your visuals don't communicate.
At K&G Goods the pattern was recognisable. Good product, strong margins, but generic listings that didn't stand out. By rebuilding the product listing design from scratch (professional photography, brand-consistent infographics, sharp titles) the dynamic changed. Not because the product changed. Because the communication changed.
It's no different from a physical shop. You can have the best product in the world, but if the window display is a mess, nobody walks in.
Competing on price is not a strategy
The most common response to disappointing sales: lower the price. It's understandable. It's also destructive.
Price competition on marketplaces is a spiral without a bottom. There's always a seller who can go cheaper. A private label from China with lower production costs. A competitor willing to sell at a loss to grab market share. A new entrant who hasn't yet realised the margins don't add up.
If your strategy on the marketplace is "be the cheapest," you have no strategy. You have a temporary position that you lose the moment someone is a euro cheaper.
The alternative is building brand value. That sounds abstract, but it's concrete:
Brand value is the difference between what your product costs and what a customer is willing to pay. You don't create that difference with features, every competitor can offer the same features. You create it with trust. With recognition. With an identity that says: this is a brand that knows what it's doing.
On a marketplace you translate that into:
- A consistent visual identity. The same style, colours and imagery on every image. A customer who sees three of your products recognises them as belonging to the same brand. That builds trust.
- Professional infographics. Not "feature 1, feature 2, feature 3" in Arial on a white background. But considered visuals that communicate your product's benefits at a glance.
- A+ Content and brand pages. The space Amazon (via the Amazon Brand Registry) and Bol.com give you to tell your brand story. Most sellers leave that space empty. The brands that win fill it with conviction.
- Consistent language. Titles, descriptions and bullet points that sound like one brand. Not like loose product sheets from a manufacturer.
At Screenmate we worked on a complete brand identity carried through to every marketplace, the own webshop and the packaging. The result is a brand that's recognisable on every channel. Customers don't remember it as "that phone holder" but as "Screenmate." That's the difference between a product and a brand.
What professional listings actually change
The impact of professional listing design is measurable, but in your own account. Not in a percentage an agency quotes you. The concrete effect per element is laid out in optimising your Bol.com listing.
Click-through rate
Your main image is the first thing a customer sees in search results. A professional hero shot with sharp lighting, correct framing and (where allowed) brand elements raises your CTR. How much exactly, nobody can honestly quote you without knowing your category and your starting position; anyone who does is citing a figure from another country, another category and usually another decade.
More clicks at the same position means more traffic without extra advertising costs. The algorithm rewards this with higher organic positions. An upward spiral instead of a downward one.
Conversion rate
The secondary images (infographics, lifestyle imagery, sizing, comparisons) determine whether a visitor buys or returns to the search results. A listing with seven strategically built images does more work than a listing with three random product photos, simply because more objections are removed before the customer voices them.
The difference isn't in quantity. It's in structure. Every image has a function:
- Hero shot. Professional, eye-catching, trust-inspiring.
- USP infographic. The three most important benefits, summed up visually.
- Feature detail. A close-up of the element that sets your product apart.
- Sizing/scale. Answers the question "how big is it?" before the customer has to ask.
- Lifestyle/context. The product in use. Gives the customer a picture of how it looks in their life.
- Comparison. Your product versus the generic alternative. Visually, not in text.
- Packaging/what's in the box. Lowers return risk by managing expectations.
Each image builds on the previous one. Together they tell the complete sales story, without the customer having to read a word.
Return rate
This is often forgotten. Poor listings don't only cause low sales, they also cause high returns. A customer who doesn't fully understand what they're buying sends the product back. Images too small, missing size information, misleading product photos, they're all return drivers.
Professional listings set expectations correctly. The customer knows what they're getting. The product matches the images. The result: fewer returns, better reviews, a higher seller rating.
The figure everyone quotes, and what sits underneath it
There is a reason this article promises no conversion percentages. Follow the common figures back to their source and you almost always arrive at a closed door.
The best-known example is Amazon's own claim about A+ Content. Its sales page states that basic A+ can raise sales by up to 8 percent and well-implemented Premium A+ by up to 20 percent. The footnote to that claim reads, in full: "Amazon internal data". No year, no sample size, no country, no measurement period.
The substantiated version did exist. Amazon's own best-practices document contained a 2018 analysis of 173,000 ASINs in the United States over 90 days, with an average of 5.6 percent and the explicit note that it was no guarantee of future sales. That document is no longer reachable; it survives only via the Internet Archive. So the number went up while the evidence underneath it disappeared.
On the Dutch side the picture is thinner still. bol publishes no quantitative figures at all on content and conversion. Its partner page on product information talks about findability, not conversion, and the percentages bol does publish are seller service standards: delivery time, cancellations, returns.
| What you often read | What actually sits underneath |
|---|---|
| "A+ Content delivers 8% more revenue" | Amazon writes "up to 8%", sourced only as "Amazon internal data". A ceiling is not an expected value |
| "Premium A+ gives +20%" | Doubly conditional: "up to" and "well-implemented" |
| "3 to 20% conversion improvement by category" | Circulates exclusively via parties selling Amazon optimisation; the source chain loops back on itself |
| "Professional photos double your conversion" | No published measurement on the Dutch market, in any category |
What that means in practice: if someone promises you a percentage before they have seen your listing, they are selling you a figure from another country. We do not promise a percentage. We promise a baseline measurement beforehand and the same measurement afterwards, in your own account.
The calculation that settles the price discussion
There is one figure that is hard, and it puts the price question in a different light.
A comparison of the ten largest marketplaces puts Amazon in the Netherlands at an average of 19.7 percent commission in August 2026, against a market average of 14.5 percent; Cdiscount is cheapest at 11.2 percent. That is commission only, excluding fulfilment, shipping and advertising.
Put that next to the demand side. Online spending fell, but almost entirely because of travel and tickets; the number of product purchases actually grew. For anyone selling physical goods, the market did not shrink.
Those two facts together give you a better strategy than cutting prices. Every euro of revenue you move from a marketplace to your own channel returns the commission difference as margin. That only works if the customer remembers your brand after first seeing it on the marketplace. Which is exactly why a marketplace listing without a brand is expensive: you pay the highest commission in the market for a customer you never see again.
From generic to distinctive: a method
The transition from generic listings to professional brand presentation isn't a matter of "taking better photos." It's a strategic process that starts with your brand and ends with each individual image.
Step 1: brand foundation
Before you make a single image, it has to be clear who you are as a brand. What's your positioning? Who is your audience? What makes you different? This doesn't have to be a months-long process, but it has to exist. A branding project lays this foundation.
Without a brand foundation you make beautiful images without direction. With a brand foundation you make images that tell a story.
Step 2: competitive analysis
Look at the top 10 in your category. What do they do visually? Where are the gaps? If everyone uses blue infographics, you stand out with a different palette. If nobody shows lifestyle imagery, that's your chance.
The mistake many brands make: copying the competition. If you look like number 1, you're a cheaper version of number 1. You have to look like yourself, but executed better than anyone in your category.
Step 3: content production
Invest in professional product photography. No stock photos, and no generated image passing for a photograph of your product: on a marketplace the main image is a factual representation of what the customer receives, and a real shot is the shortest route there. Generated imagery has its place in variants, backgrounds and test material, and we use it there. The choice depends on what the image has to prove. What it always has to be: shot or built by someone who knows the platform requirements. Amazon's and Bol.com's technical requirements are specific: background, lighting, framing, resolution. One mistake and your image gets rejected.
Combine packshots with infographics that communicate your USPs visually. Use your brand colours, your typography, your imagery. Every image is a brand expression.
Step 4: optimise and measure
Don't publish and forget. Monitor your click-through rate, conversion rate and return rate. Compare against the period before. Test variations, a different main image, a different order of infographics, different copy in your bullet points.
Amazon offers A/B testing via Manage Your Experiments. Bol.com gives you data via the seller portal. Use that data. The difference between a well-performing listing and an excellent-performing listing often sits in the details you only see when you measure.
The market isn't getting easier
The number of sellers on Bol.com and Amazon grows every year, and Dutch e-commerce keeps growing according to research by Thuiswinkel.org. The competition gets denser. The standard shifts. What was "good enough" three years ago is below par today.
Brands that don't invest now in professional marketplace presentation get overtaken by brands that do. Not tomorrow, it's already happening. Scroll through your category and you see it: the listings are getting better. The photography is getting more professional. The branding is getting more consistent.
That's not a threat. It's an opportunity. Because the majority still doesn't invest. The majority still uploads manufacturer photos, still writes generic titles and still competes on price. As long as that's the case, there's room for brands that take it seriously.
The question isn't whether professional listings work. The question is how long you can afford not to have them.
