Having Trouble Finding Real Wholesalers For Your Online Store?

I truly believe that when it comes to online retail, you make money on the buy.  The better your buying strategy is, the more profitable you are and the more flexibility you have with your pricing strategy.  The key is to find real wholesale distributors and not those who provide a “middleman” product sourcing service.  By this, I mean companies who offer millions of product sku’s to you for a monthly fee, certain types of dropshipping services, and ones who market themselves as wholesalers.   You want real wholesalers.   Typically, the real ones are hard to find if just starting out.  A quick test to see if a supplier is real or not is:

1.  Do they require copies of your resale certificate (eg. vendor’s license, etc) – Real wholesalers will ask you for it. Those that don’t aren’t legally wholesalers, you are just buying at a cheap retail through them to get access to their suppliers.

2.  Do they assign you an account representative or give you access to wholesale pricing for free? Those that market themselves as wholesalers typically charge monthly fees to give you that “secret access” to the product.  They are selling memberships for a service. They are not the wholesaler themselves, even though it appears in their marketing material that merchandise is being shipped from one of their “many” warehouses.  Real wholesalers will give you a dedicated sales representative and a pretty thorough screening before allowing just anyone in.

3.  Is the wholesale cost reasonable? In other words, go out and shop the prices of what specific items are selling for.  If you find that typical retail prices are less than a suppliers so-called wholesale price is, then chances are they are a middleman.  Look for real wholesale pricing to be around 50-70% of what the average retail prices is.  Of course that number is a generalization and fluctuates by market.  For example, consumer electronics has a much narrower margin between wholesale and retail as well as more competitive pricing since that market is highly competitive.

If you are looking for help in sourcing products online, I recommend you look at two things.

First, signup for our monthly newsletter.  Each month we provide extra tips for your online store not found on the website and we spotlight real wholesale companies that may be of interest to you depending on your target market.  We are not associated with these companies in any way, it is just a service that we offer as a newsletter subscriber.

Second, checkout Worldwide Brands by following the link to the left. They provide a lot of information on how to find real wholesalers.  Even if you do not sign up for their premium access, the free information and tutorials are excellent.  Now, since I just bashed sites that charge monthly fees, let me clarify something.  Worldwide brands is just a membership listing and search tool used to find the real wholesalers. They do not sell you products or dropship on your behalf.  They are not distributors.   The reason why I like them is that they provide a search engine and directory that will save you hundreds of hours of time in trying to find real distributors.  Their site is always up to date and the companies listed are willing to work with small online businesses. However, you will still need to meet the minimum requirements (eg. vendors license, minimum orders, etc).

Now because I believe in full disclosure, keep in mind that if you click the link on the left, you are supporting the continuation of this website, as they are one of our sponsors.  But I have been a member of their website for over four years now (well before the existence of this site) and it is (or was) a one time cost for a lifetime membership.  Each time I launch a new business, it is the first place I look for real distributors in my niche before searching on my own.