Jelle Van de Vliet

Filling 10.000s of Bol.com carts since November 2015

Jelle Van de Vliet -

Two years ago, November 2015, I launched the "Bol.com Rekeningopvuller". To be completely honest with you, it sounds strange to talk about it in English right now, even more so because back then I really wanted to create solely Dutch side-projects. If you want to read more about the history of the Bol.com Rekeningopvuller in Dutch, there's more info here.

Taking a step back

You might ask yourself: "What's this cart filling all about and what's bol.com?". So let's take a step back here.

Bol.com is the biggest online store of Belgium (mostly Flanders) and The Netherlands. In that aspect, it's a lot like Amazon. It has a massive catalog of products and allows third parties to sell on its platform.

Now for the "cart filling" part, you have to keep in mind that Dutch people (and most of the Flemish people as well but we don't like to admit that) are quite frugal.

So imagine this scenario:
You want to buy this book. At the time of writing it's €19.99 for the paperback version. You don't need anything else for the time being, and you decide to check out.

But all of a sudden, you see this:

You have to pay €2.49 shipping costs because you didn't reach the free shipment limit of 20 euro. Not only that, you're only 1 cent away from reaching that limit.

So you have to pay €2.49 because you're 1 cent short. The madness! (I told you, we're frugal!)

So basically there are two options:

  1. You fall for the marketing trick and add another product in order to reach the free shipment limit.
  2. You don't buy the book

What if I told you there is a third option?

Let's fill your cart

What if you could add a very cheap item to your cart. Preferably the price of the item would be exactly what you come short. You would save the €2.49 shipping costs and you'd get the item you wanted to buy.

Here's where the "Rekeningopvuller" (or the "cart filler" in English) comes into play. It collects all kind of cheap items - e-books, deodorant, toothpicks - so you don't have to spend time looking for it on Bol.com. Let's say you are 2 cent short, it shows that you can add a cheap e-book of 2 cents. And if you add that to your cart you won't have to pay shipping costs anymore!

And that's what the Cart Filler is. A couple of days after I launched it, it went viral in Belgium and The Netherlands. And to this day over 16.000 carts has been filled! It's still being used on daily basis.

How a little tool like this can help a lot of people save some money!