Product Sourcing News   

Getting Holiday Deals from Wholesalers

By: Chris Malta, CEO, WorldwideBrands.com

Most online sellers tend to think that the wholesale price lists they get from wholesale companies are set in stone. Those are the prices, and that’s that. Not true! Wholesalers will negotiate under the right conditions.

This is a great time of year, right now, to look for those potentially negotiable prices. Why? Well, as we approach the Holidays, wholesalers get more and more worried about emptying their warehouses before the year ends.

See, any products they have left in those warehouses as of January 1st costs the wholesaler money, in the form of taxes. That’s why they’re so careful earlier in the year to try to make exact predictions of how many products they think they’ll sell through the Holidays.

By late summer, most wholesale companies have bought everything they think they’re going to sell for the Holidays, and they generally will not place any more orders from their manufacturers.

That’s why you get backorders during the Holidays. You’d think you would never get backorders through the Holidays, because you’d think that a wholesaler would just keep ordering more and more products from the manufacturers as they sold them through such a busy retail season. BUT, when you realize that wholesalers are basically on a forced countdown to zero products in stock by December 31st for tax reasons, you see why they run out of many things through the Holidays and don’t re-stock.

This creates an exciting opportunity for YOU. Every wholesaler is going to make the mistake of stocking too many of at least SOME of their products. As Holiday sales progress and they realize that they have some products that are not going to sell out completely, they start looking for ways to get rid of them. So, they become willing to negotiate lower pricing on those products for a limited time. Bad for them, good for you!

So what do you do? Call your wholesale rep. Ask them if they have any specials or can give you any price breaks on any of their products. This is the perfect time to do it. You may find some great deals.

Make sure you negotiate. If you find something they’re willing to give you a break on, don’t take their first offer. Try to work them down in price a little further. Even if you don’t think you’ll sell the stuff during the Holidays either, it’s a great time and a great opportunity to set yourself up with some serious savings for the first quarter of your 2010 sales year, when those same products will be at full wholesale price again. Get it cheap now, sell it later!