Starting Your Internet Business Right
Another method of Product Sourcing for your Online Business is to buy "in bulk" from Wholesale Suppliers.
This means, of course, that you find a Wholesale Supplier, and spend some money up front buying a few cases of products from them. The Wholesale Supplier ships those products to you. You stash those cases of products in your garage or spare room or storage unit... you get the idea, and re-pack and ship each product individually to your customers.
The advantage
of this method is this:
- When you buy anything in bulk quantities, you do get better Wholesale Prices. This gives you a better competitive edge when you sell in price-driven markets like eBay & Amazon. A price-driven market is when customers shop on these types of sites, they're looking to spend as little money as possible for those products.
So, many third party site sellers prefer to buy products in bulk, because they do get better wholesale pricing, and have more room to make a better profit in those price-driven markets.
The disadvantage of this method is
this:
- Most real Wholesale Suppliers won't work with you.
It's
unfortunate, but true. Most of the real Wholesale Suppliers out there do not
want to sell bulk orders of products to small, Home-based Online Businesses. Why? Simple.
Because we don't have the money to order thousands of dollars worth of products all at one time.
You see, a Wholesale Supplier's business is based on volume sales. They don't make very much of a profit on the products they Wholesale. That means that they have to sell a lot of product in order to make money. So, a Wholesale Supplier's main business is selling truckloads of products to large retail chains. They simply won't sell to anyone who can't afford to place a minimum order ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 or so. They don't consider it to be worth their effort!
Worldwide Brands comes to the Rescue!
Yes, I'm going to talk about my company again. I know I've said it before, but I really want to stress that the purpose of this EBook is to help you with genuinely free information. It is not meant to be a commercial for my company.
However, what we do here is to create real solutions to some of the problems you're going to face when starting your Online Business and it would be silly of me to not tell you about those solutions!
The Problem:
- Most real Wholesale Suppliers will not work with Online Only Businesses, because as a small, Home-based Business, you can't afford to spend between $5,000 and $25,000 to buy the minimum quantities of products required by these Wholesale Suppliers.
The Solution:
- Over the years, Worldwide Brands has become very well known in the Wholesale industry, because we've not only helped small business owners to connect with Suppliers; we've brought a great deal of business to many Wholesale Suppliers from small businesses.
Because we have that reputation, we
are able to go to large Wholesale Suppliers and say, "Look, there are a
lot of small businesses out there who
want to buy in bulk, but can't afford your high minimums. If you're willing to lower
your minimums to an affordable level for us, we will get your company's
name out to many Online Businesses that want to buy from you.
The Wholesale Suppliers like the idea that we can bring
them your business without costing them any advertising money on their
end. It's truly a win-win situation for everyone.
"Light Bulk" Wholesaler is a term that we created to describe a real Wholesale Supplier that will:
o Sell New, Factory-Warranted Products, at Wholesale Pricing, to you; the Online Business Owner.
o Sell to you in Affordable Quantities, with minimum orders under $500. That's why we call it "Light Bulk".
o Our Research Team has spoken personally with each and every one of the thousands of Wholesale Suppliers in this Directory. They are all willing to do business with you on the terms above. Their contact information is updated constantly, and our Team adds new Wholesale Suppliers every week.
Anyway, thousands fully pre-verified and legitimate Light Bulk Wholesale Suppliers are available in our Online Directory, available on our web site at WorldwideBrands.com. So, enough with the commercial. Let's talk some more about how to actually pack and ship products from your home.
Using Light Bulk Wholesalers
1. Once you find a Light Bulk Wholesaler you want to work with, you'll contact them and set up a free Account, so you can buy from them.
2. You'll need to prepare your Packing and Shipping workspace. A spare room, a basement or a garage usually work best, but many people do this right in their living rooms. :o) You'll need:
- Some kind of organized shelving, where you can place your products and label the shelves with the product names and stock numbers
- Shipping materials, like properly sized boxes, shipping bags, shipping tape, some bubble-wrap plastic or Styrofoam "peanuts", etc. Your Wholesale Supplier will be able to give you the sizes of the shipping boxes or bags you'll need to ship each individual product.
- An Inbox and an Outbox, or something similar, so you can physically keep track of which orders still need to be filled, and which are already done.
- A Shipping Account. You can setup an online shipping account to print out labels at UPS.com, FedEx.com, or USPS.com... or all 3! You can also arrange to have the shippers pickup the packages from your location.
3. After you do some Market Research you decide which products you want to sell Online, and place an order for those products.
4. The cases of products arrive at your home. The first thing you need to do is inspect those products! Open the cases, and take all the products out. Do a quick inspection for signs of obviously broken or damaged products. Damaged products are rare, but you do need to find out right away if all the products you have are in good shape. If you do find one or two that are damaged, the sooner you tell your Wholesaler, the better. They will work out a replacement arrangement for you that won't cost you anything.
5. Alternatively, you can choose to use a Fulfillment Center instead of warehousing products in your home, or at your own warehouse. Fulfillment Centers exist all across he US and around the world. They act as shared warehouses that lots of small businesses can use. When you use a Fulfillment Center, you have your products shipped there directly from your wholesaler, and the Fulfillment Center stores them for you. They connect to your web site with their software. Whenever your site gets an order, they get notified automatically, and they ship your product from their shelves right to your customer. This usually isn't any more expensive than the shipping and handling you would charge your customer anyway, so it becomes virtually a free warehousing system for your business!
6. Place images and descriptions online and you're ready to go!
Remember that when you're shipping products to your customers yourself, you should never let more than 48 hours go by before you ship each product. Customer Service is very important; you need to be sure to keep your customers happy!
A word about Large Volume Wholesalers
I've mentioned befoer Large Volume Wholesalers as being an important part of that critical Multiple Product Sourcing Method strategy, so let's talk about them for a minute. At Worldwide Brands, we use the term "Large Volume Wholesaler" to describe a wholesale company that does not drop ship OR "light bulk" wholesale. Rather, they are companies that we have investigated and found to be legitimate wholesalers who sell in larger bulk quantities, but are willing to make deals with you on an individual basis.
Large Volume Wholesalers are VERY important to your overall product sourcing.
If you'll remember from an earlier Chapter, Jay Smith wanted to place some
inexpensive accessories on his web site that he knew were going to sell well.
In the case of the actual person that the Jay Smith story is based on, he
invested some of his profits in buying a slightly larger bulk quantity of these
products, and the rest is history. Those products paid for themselves and earned
a profit, he reinvested in more, and so on.
It's also important to realize that if you deal DIRECTLY with REAL Drop Shippers and Light Bulk Wholesalers, THEY are all actually General Wholesalers as well. They're General Wholesalers who are ALSO willing to Drop Ship and sell in Light Bulk Quantities, that's all. They will all be happy to give you better price breaks if you buy larger quantity from them to round out a product line that sells well for you.
