Product sourcing for home business begins with your desire to sell niche products or mass market consumer products from your own website, physical store or even on eBay. At some point, you will have to consider the ways and means of competing with not only local, land based retailers, but as well, your competition online. This, of course, means finding product suppliers willing to negotiate prices allowing you to make a profit. Some of the kinds of sources to consider will be:
true wholesaler distributors
drop shipper wholesalers
liquidation closeout specialists
local retail store closeouts
factory direct suppliers
In addition, there is the retinue of “standard” sources always mentioned in advice blogs:
garage sales
estate sales
closeout auctions
charity craft auctions
There is nothing wrong with these sources, but they are applicable for a relatively small number of businesses.
Depending on the type of product you want to sell, the best place to start looking may be locally. This has a number of advantages. Why pay shipping charges for goods sent from a supplier across country when you could take a drive in your own car to a local supplier for small goods or hire a van for bigger stuff? Some local wholesalers might even provide a cheap or even free delivery service. More importantly, in my opinion, is the opportunity to buy direct from a local product manufacturer or from local crafts and trades people.
Wholesalers, however, as a rule generally don’t advertise in the mass media such as TV or newspapers and so they are often difficult to find. To get you started, here are a few ideas for locating wholesale sources of niche products for you to sell:
1) One of the first places to look is in your local trade directory, many wholesalers place advertisements in local trade directories and even in the Yellow Pages for the products they carry.
2) Another place to conduct your research is on the internet, and there are search engines which are wholesale specific such as www.wholesalecentral.com and www.wholesalequest.com. These wholesale specific search engines allow you to search for wholesale sources by browsing categories or by entering keywords (related to the products you want to sell) into a search bar.
You can find other wholesale specific search engines or directories by typing “wholesale search engine” or “wholesale directory” or “wholesale directories” or even “wholesalers” into the search engine of your choice.
3) Nearly all wholesalers will belong to a trade association and these trade associations will often host trade shows all over the world. It stands to reason that an excellent place to discover new wholesale sources is to visit as many trade shows as you can. Here are two ways of finding suitable tradeshows:
i) Join a trade association related to the goods you wish to sell and subscribe to their periodicals or newsletters as these always carry details of local, regional and international trade shows.
ii) Conduct research on the internet by visiting websites such as Trade Show News Network (www.tsnn.com). You could also search for others by entering “trade show directory” or add a keyword related to your products to the search phrase – for example, “jewelry trade shows”.
4) Look for the items you wish to sell in a local store, when you find the item look carefully at the packaging as many suppliers provide their contact details and often include their website URL. You can either contact them directly or visit their website to discover how to either purchase from them directly (which is often cheaper than buying from a wholesaler), or if that is not possible ask them who your local wholesaler is and if they can give you the wholesaler’s contact details.
Once you have a list of possible wholesale sources for your niche products you need to do some due diligence on each wholesaler. You need to find out if they are legitimate businesses and are approved by the manufacturers. They last thing you want to get involved in is a copyright lawsuit because you are inadvertently selling illegal copies of the original product.
From a purely business point of view you need to find out their payment terms, return policies, shipping charges and methods. If you can, you need to get references from other customers; are they happy with the wholesalers service or not?
Once you have decided on a wholesale source, there’s one thing you need to be aware of… When you purchase from a wholesaler you often have to buy in bulk. Although more and more wholesale distributors for mass market goods allow you buy single items, it is often the case that you cannot buy individual items. If you’re just starting out you’re probably going to find this quite expensive, but there is a way to reduce this cost. If you can, find another established customer who buys the same products as you, you can approach them with a joint venture whereby they sell you products for a set profit, say 20% on each item you buy. Your end of the joint venture will be that you agree to buy a set number of items each month and that don’t compete with them directly.
You may also find that you can source the products for your home business with liquidation-closeout goods. These goods come from retail stores who are liquidating stock. Very often, the merchandise is new or as good as new. One of the secrets of successful ebay sellers is finding liquidation sources that allow them cheap access to brand name goods.
Filed under: Sourcing Advice
