It used to be that most sellers would start off with things they could find locally. Local sourcing was very valuable! Especially eBay sellers! Scouring yard sales, antique malls, flea markets, second hand shops, pawn shops and more to find that amazing little nugget that is going to make you way more than you paid for it!
I know! I was one of them! My sister and I had a little eBay side business way back in 1998. We had tons of fun going to yard sales & estate auctions and reselling things from people that had no idea that their item was worth way more than they were selling it for.
But that was just a fun little side hustle. We weren’t in it to make millions of dollars.. But we were in it for the thrill of finding something for $1.00 and selling it for $100.00!
We didn’t always find something at every stop. So some days we wouldn’t have anything new to offer and other times we overpaid because we thought it would go for more online. Remember, this was also back before smartphones and being able to look things up at a moments notice. This simply was not a sustainable business model. But also even more so because the climate of online sales was taking a drastic change and if you wanted to keep up, you too had to make a drastic change.
Moving Beyond Local Sourcing
The biggest problems with local sourcing are 1. it’s very time consuming 2. product selection is limited and 3. product availability is not consistent. So when you are ready to move your business to the next level, then you need to find legitimate wholesalers to work with.
You can still do your local sourcing, but if you want to grow your business, you need products you can sell over and over and over and that’s where wholesale suppliers come into the picture.
But not just any wholesale supplier, a factory authorized distributor or wholesaler is where you should focus your time and energy. These companies get their products directly from the manufacturer. When you are so close to the top of the wholesale chain, you get better prices & better service. These companies have to maintain the values and conditions that the manufacturers have set on the products and it is their responsibility to ensure that the retailers are also following those guidelines.
So remember, that there are MANY brands a newer online seller simply cannot sell. Large brand companies already either have ALL of the retailers they want selling their products or their minimums are so high that a small retailer simply cannot buy in to even try selling the products.
Stop Spinning Your Wheels Hearing No’s
You can most definitely find genuine, legitimate wholesalers on your own, but why not leave it to the professionals? It’s a time consuming process, full of rejection and fact finding. You want to make sure that you are working with the best supplier possible for those products and so that supplier research for any business, new or established, is extremely important.
We’ve already been doing the work for you for over 20 years.
We have been providing the Directory of Certified Wholesaler and Dropshippers to online retailers (and offline retailers) for a very long time.
Finding and verifying the legitimacy of every single supplier before adding them to our Directory is what we are most proud of and do extremely well. We do not rely on search engine searches for “wholesale” or “dropship” or other directories to do the work for us. Digging through the trenches and utilizing trade shows and other means to locate the real manufacturers and factory authorized distributors of the products for our members is what we spend our time on.
“We want the best of the best in the Directory because we only want the best for our members. ” Tisha Hedges, Director of Operations
We then reach out to those companies and start the process of learning more about them and if they could be a fit. If they qualify, we will add them to the Directory for our members to find.
Go here to become a lifetime member. CLICK HERE
Want more information about our B2B Directory first? Watch the video HERE.
