Inside Qogita's Office: A Day in Amsterdam With the Team Behind the Platform

Who I was talking to

Charlie is Australian, born in Melbourne, and ended up in Amsterdam after stints in London and Berlin. He has been at Qogita just over two years and looks after buyer growth: getting new buyers onto the platform and feeding what they say back into the product. He is also the person who did the live Q&A with my students earlier in the year, which is why I asked him to host the day. His reason for saying yes was the same as mine for flying out.

Along the way I met Ali, who runs the inbound and outbound sales teams, Vincent, an engineer who builds integrations for the biggest buyers, the two people who head up logistics, and Charlie's intern Jeremy. I was only the second person from the UK to film inside the office, which tells you how new all of this still is.

The office

Qogita sits in a shared building in Amsterdam with a restaurant upstairs, an art gallery that changes every month and a rooftop used for events. Charlie told me the building was the old diamond trading hub in the Dutch colonial era, fell into disrepair, was bought by a university, burned down and was rebuilt to look as it originally did. Qogita started in a WeWork and has now outgrown this floor too, so the team is moving upstairs.

Most of the company works here: tech, growth, logistics, sales and support. The support team is literally over the wall from where we sat, which matters more than it sounds and I will come back to it. The leadership team was away doing fourth quarter planning the day I visited, because Q4 is the biggest period of the year for Qogita, for resellers and for anyone in retail.

How Qogita makes money, and why the €100 code exists

This was my main question. Qogita is a marketplace: hundreds of wholesalers, distributors and brands list their stock, you buy through one checkout, and Qogita takes care of admin, logistics, claims and support. It does not mark the stock up to a retail style margin.

A thin margin means revenue comes from volume. So the business is built around two things: bringing in buyers, and keeping them ordering. Charlie laid out the three ways any company grows. Viral growth, which is rare. Sticky growth, where you keep more customers than you lose. And paid growth, where you pay to acquire a customer and it only works if what they spend over time is worth more than what they cost to bring in.

The €100 is paid growth. Qogita is effectively paying €100 to get a new buyer through the door, and it pays back if that buyer sticks around and keeps ordering. When I asked whether the code would continue, the answer was yes, for as long as that maths holds, because affiliates and communities like mine are one of their core channels. In other words it is not a permanent promise, it is a business decision that keeps being made because it works. If you are going to use it, use it to place a real first order you have already checked the numbers on.

Enterprise buyers, bulk discounts and preorders

Qogita has an enterprise team looking after very large buyers, and I was curious whether they get a different platform. They do not. Everyone uses the same website; a managed account just gets a person attached to it. What has changed recently is available to all of us:

• Bulk discounts. New at the time of filming and open to every buyer, not just enterprise accounts.
• Preorders. Longer lead times, roughly two to six weeks, with higher minimums and price reductions Charlie put at around 20%. These usually happen when Qogita is buying directly from a brand. They were also working on brand deals in the UAE and Korea, with the Korea logistics not yet running when we spoke.
• Integrations. Vincent builds custom integrations for buyers who order anywhere from a thousand to forty thousand units at a time and do not want to click through a website. As he put it, the website might break at forty thousand products.

For context, one of the biggest UK distributors I use has no ordering website at all. They email a spreadsheet price list once a week, the minimum order is £8,000 plus VAT, and getting an order in takes about a week of back and forth. My staff place Qogita orders without me even thinking about it. That difference in friction is most of the reason I use it.

Pallets

My larger orders have started arriving on a pallet rather than as ten separate boxes. Charlie was quick to say that is the logistics team's work, not his, and that pallets need a more complex and more expensive setup behind the scenes. From my side it is simple: liquids, lotions and glass get damaged far less often on a pallet, and anything heading straight into an Amazon fulfilment centre is better off that way.

Brands or distributors?

I asked whether Qogita is moving from distributors to buying from brands directly. Charlie's answer was that it is not that clean. Brands often sell on Qogita alongside the distributors who were already listing their products, and it depends entirely on how much control a brand wants. A brand like Chanel will never allow it. Other brands are restrictive in the UK and relaxed in Italy, so the rules change by country. Qogita has someone leading brand expansion whose job is to distil all of that into one simple checkout for the buyer, so you do not need to know who sits behind the listing.

Where Qogita is going next

Beauty is the niche today: fragrance, skincare, haircare, makeup and bath. Charlie said health, personal care and supplements are absolutely something they are looking to do, and that the enterprise team is already talking to large health stores and pharmacies, so the demand will drive what supply gets added. Two areas growing quickly right now are Arabian fragrances and Korean skincare, where TikTok has told them search volume from the UK and US is still largely untapped.

On geography, the US and Australia come up, but they have not gone there yet and Charlie was honest about why.

If you run a pharmacy or a health and beauty shop, that category expansion is worth watching. You are already buying these lines from a wholesaler, and Qogita gives you a second price to compare against with no minimum beyond the individual supplier's.

Why every supplier is in the UK or Europe

This was the part I most wanted on camera, because it is the difference between Qogita and the seller who lost £4,000 to a fake wholesaler in my review. Every supplier on the platform is based in the UK or Europe, and that is a deliberate choice.

UK and EU company and VAT registration systems are rigid and similar, which makes a supplier straightforward to verify and hard to fake. Charlie listed what Qogita checks: the location on Google Maps, the physical premises, the registration, how long the company has been trading and its filed accounts. That is the same list I give my students for checking any supplier, except Qogita has done it before the supplier ever appears in your search results.

Two honest caveats. First, Qogita describes this as control over vetting, which is not the same as a guarantee, and I still check the first delivery from any new supplier, on or off the platform. Second, many wholesalers simply refuse to work with Amazon sellers at all, which is part of why so many of us end up here.

Imports, duties and VAT

When you buy from an EU supplier, there are no import duties to pay and shipping is included in the price. Import VAT does still apply, as it does on any import into the UK, and if you are VAT registered you reclaim it as normal. I got that wrong on camera for a second and corrected myself, so I am saying it clearly here.

Charlie's understanding, with the caveat that logistics is not his department, is that Qogita has a UK registered entity that acts as importer of record and pays the clearance fees, which is why shipments are not held up at customs. The other protection he mentioned is damage. With other suppliers, he said, around 3% of orders arrive damaged and the buyer is simply out of pocket. On Qogita you photograph the damage and the barcode, submit a claim and get refunded.

Support, and the chatbot called Maggie

Support is in house, in the same office, and nothing is outsourced. The first thing you meet is an AI chatbot called Maggie, which Charlie is responsible for. If you want a person, say so: typing “I need to speak to a human” or raising any order query escalates it to the support team, and you should hear back the same day or within 24 hours.

What I took away

Three things. The company is real, the team is normal, and the model makes sense. A thin margin business has to keep you happy or it does not get paid, which is a better incentive than most of the wholesalers I have dealt with. The second is that the catalogue is going to get wider, and the people most likely to benefit are shops and pharmacies already buying health and beauty lines from one source. The third is Q4. Charlie pointed at the Keepa charts: fragrance prices climb every year from October, and the sellers who do well are the ones who have stock in by then.

If you have not tried it yet, register with code SU100, start with a small order you have already run the numbers on, and if you are new to all of this come and ask in our free Discord first.

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