Shyyyyt, it sounds, shyyyyt. Behind a fence loom gigantic shelving units, up to 40 meters high, full of gray plastic bins filled with, yes, what exactly? Or what not? It could be headphones, Lego building kits, razors, sex toys, value packs of shower gel. Products that form the endless range of online stores. What exactly is there is difficult to see through the bars of the fence. There are no lights on.
The dark racks are the working area of 2,160 robots, which do not need light to do their work. It is not the intention that people enter here, apart from occasional visits from maintenance technicians. This is the ‘shuttle’, a device in which bol stores products in its automated distribution center. The stuff machine is a kind of XXXL version of a soft drink machine, filled with 850,000 gray crates full of stuff.
Some kind of skateboards shoot back and forth along the planks at a speed of 30 to 40 kilometers per hour – that’s where the whooshing sound comes from. When a product is needed, . Depending on the size, the machine can fit up to 7 million products.
The largest online store in the Netherlands quickly mentions numbers that are so high that it becomes difficult to imagine them. Last year, bol and the external traders active on the bol platform together sold 5.9 billion euros to customers in the Netherlands and Belgium. The range consists of 51 million products. That is almost three per Dutch person – and there can be thousands of copies of each unique product in stock. What does that look like in practice?
Photos Merlin Daleman, Walter Herfst
With that question went NRC to an industrial estate in Waalwijk. There, on a street called Pakketweg, is the bol fulfillment center (BFC), which covers 100,000 square meters. you arrive at 240,000 square meters. Inside, products are stored and shipped “up to the size of an air fryer,” says director of logistics operations Safak Tuna during a tour of Bol’s largest and most important distribution center. Toys, socks, coffee cups, detergent and power strips, a total of 12 million copies.
That’s a lot, but not even 51 million. The largest part of that range consists of books, which Bol has sent to customers from, among others, the Centraal Boekenhuis. In addition, there are 45,500 external sellers active on BOL, from small entrepreneurs to major brands such as Brabantia. They can completely outsource their logistics and bring their items to the BFC, but their supply can also be located in their own distribution centers. Bol itself has another center in Waalwijk and two warehouses for products that cannot be sent as a normal package. A clothes drying rack, for example, or heavy white goods.
16,000 orders per hour
During the day it is relatively quiet at Bol, the crowds only come after office hours. “Then more will be ordered,” says Tuna. At peak times around Black Friday, the online store receives up to 48,000 orders per hour, which have to be processed during the rest of the evening and night. The BFC can send out up to 45,000 orders per hour. Tuna calls it “a kind of factory” where “production is running” of more packages every year.
At peak times, approximately 2,500 people work there. The staff on the floor are not employed by bol itself, but work through employment agencies for partner company Ceva Logistics. It runs distribution centers worldwide, including in the Netherlands for Bijenkorf and Zalando, among others.
Actually, Tuna is not a fan of periods when special offers are made. “It’s nice that Black Friday is starting earlier and earlier, that takes the pressure off for us. Logistically, you prefer that demand is evenly distributed throughout the year.” His department has the authority to adjust the commercial course of the company. “You don’t want there to be too many bulk deals on Black Friday for heavy items like laundry detergent.”
Three human touches
Ordered before midnight, delivered the next day, promises full service with most products. To achieve this, the logistics operation has been extensively automated. Products stored in the gray bins of the shuttle are only handled three times by a human BOL employee.
The first time is at the inbounddepartment: a long warehouse where trucks unload pallets of stuff. These are unpacked and the items are placed loosely in the gray bins. People work, and according to Tuna it will remain that way for the time being. “This is the most difficult to automate.” Every pallet and every product is slightly different in shape, and suppliers do not deliver it in the same way every time.
Once a product has been placed in a container, software determines where it will go in the shelving units. The products wait in the shuttle until they are purchased by a customer. Sometimes the same day, but it can also take months.
When a product has been sold, the gray bin is removed from the storage racks. Not immediately as soon as the customer has pressed the order button; it is often more efficient to wait a while until more products have been ordered from the same bin, so that the shuttle only has to go up and down once.
The crate goes to a workstation, where the second person with whom the products come into contact stands. A red light highlights the products that the employee must take from the bin. They are scanned and placed in another container, this time made of blue plastic.
The blue crates are filled with products from different customers. Everything is mixed up again: felt-tip pens, fitness elastics, cuddly toys. The blue bin goes on a conveyor belt to the end point: packing and shipping.
The third employee is standing there. He removes the products from the crate, scans them and places them on a conveyor belt. Razor blades, bath slippers, multiple copies of the same electric toothbrush. A machine folds a brown strip of cardboard around it, exactly to size, and sticks an address sticker on it. The package goes via conveyor belts to PostNL’s indoor sorting center.
Netherlands, Waalwijk, 07-05-25
Bol.com
Photo Merlin Daleman
In addition to the shuttle, which will be delivered in 2022, there is a five-year older part that is not robotized. There is no robot that spits out the products at the right time, but people collect the items by hand.
According to Tuna, they do not have to fear for their jobs. People remain necessary because they can be deployed more flexibly than robots. “We don’t need peak capacity all the time.” Installing enough robots and machines to fully handle even the busiest days would mean that some of the equipment would be idle for the rest of the year. They are too expensive for that: even if they are not used, depreciation and maintenance costs continue. Then bol prefers to hire some extra temporary workers to bridge the busy periods.
Review returns
Right next to the distribution center, bol has another building block: the bol returns center (BRC). And although the two warehouses are next to each other, due to their enormous size it is a 1,200 meter walk from one entrance to the other.
In the hall there are metal carts full of carelessly taped garbage bags and sagging cardboard boxes, it smells like old paper. When sending, Bol folds the cardboard as tightly as possible around the products – the less air is transported, the more efficient. The packages that Bol receives back are a lot messier. Here and there the smiling logo of competitor Amazon appears on a box.
On the work floor while inspecting and organizing returned packages at BOL.COM.
photo Walter Autumn
It’s a lot quieter here than at the shipping center. This process processes more than 23,000 parcels per day on the busiest days this year; the BRC will receive a maximum of 23,000 in return. Employees have less time pressure, returns must be processed within three days at the latest. “This is much less of a factory,” says Tuna. “While the BFC is about speed, here it is about precision.”
The packages are thrown onto a conveyor belt and pass through a scanning device. This reads from the barcode on the label which products the customer has registered for return online, and sends the package to a processing line.
At one of the 150 workstations, employees scan the package and unpack it. A screen shows what should be in the package. An employee unpacks a box of incense and a ceramic plate to insert the fragrance sticks. A series of questions appear on the screen: are there scratches on the incense holder? She looks at the board from all sides and decides not. The product is still as new and can be returned to the sales stock.
The system also provides instructions via the screen: the mirror of a make-up box must be polished. Sometimes more than one cleaning cloth is needed. Products with more signs of use or, for example, functions that work with Bluetooth, go to the department refurbishment. There, employees check whether smart devices have been completely deleted. A keyboard is thoroughly cleaned and plastic bags containing parts are replaced if necessary.
With many returns, there is nothing wrong with the product itself, but the box is damaged in transit. Until two years ago, these items were rejected, but now Bol places a sticker over the damage and the item is still sold as new. Boxes that are too damaged are replaced by new ones made of bare cardboard. “That is not possible with every product,” says Tuna. “With a printer, but with Lego the original box is part of the experience.”
Even toilet paper is coming back
There are trolleys with processed products scattered throughout the centre. A stack of Nespresso machines, air fryers, but also a pack of toilet paper. “In principle, everything we sell can be returned. But when you think of toilet paper, you think: it’s not quite what I thought…”
After the inspection, 70 percent of the returned items can be sold as new again, says Tuna. Items that are rejected are returned to the supplier or to a buyer. Bol donates products that are incomplete – a mug set of which one is broken – to thrift stores.
“We have to destroy less than one percent, that is really the very last option. Then the product must be completely broken, for example a broken mirror.”
Fraud corner
Further on in the returns center is what Tuna calls the “fraud corner”: the department investigations. “You see the other side of society here.” An employee shows a package that, according to the label, should contain a Sonos speaker costing 159 euros, but which actually contains a bottle of Robijn fabric softener. “People are very crafty,” says Tuna. “Such a bottle probably has about the same weight and they hope that we only look at that.”
Another package shows that there is not always malicious intent. A customer was going to return a set of bamboo toothbrushes, but the cardboard envelope contained a game. “That’s crazy,” says Tuna. “That game is probably more expensive than the toothbrushes. That needs to be investigated further.” Customer service at the head office in Utrecht is notified to contact the customer. Until there is clarity, the game will remain in a filing cabinet.
Some customers really push the limits of the extensive return options, Tuna sees. They ‘borrow’ products for a few weeks and then return them used. “Then after 29 days you receive a vacuum cleaner back and it is full of dog hair. That is not fraud, because you can try out a product. But I do think: come on, this is not possible. But that customer will get his money back.”
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