What Is Product Sourcing? - Finding Products To Sell?
Product Sourcing Research - Finding Products for my store!
When it comes to selling products online and become a successful retailer, nothing beats how to source products at wholesale prices. Having said that, there are fair questions to answer: what is exactly product sourcing, what are the best sites to go and what are the exact pitfalls to avoid.
As you know, a lot of my success selling products online has to do with the profit margin of my products. Well, there is a well disguised enemy hidden on the path from the manufacturer of the product to your online store. Product sourcing is nothing more that assure yourself that your wholesale products arrive your online store directly from REAL wholesale suppliers untouched by this mortal enemy. This enemy is known as the middleman.
The middleman is always around! Now, there’s a way to get rid of him. Below are four principles that will keep this high-margin killer away from your store:
Wholesale suppliers always work with legal business
One of the most simple ways to avoid dealing with scams is with this principle, Genuine wholesalers always will ask you legal paperwork before doing any business with you. So this item is double edged: a) stay away if they don´t ask you for boring legal paperwork and b) Be legal, yes, start your business as a corporation or as DBA, but become a legal business.
Another worthy reason for becoming legal business, its credibility. I think that people will prefer purchasing from you that from anybody else who is not a legal business.
Local chamber of commerce
When sourcing products, a very good idea would be to contact the local chamber of commerce of the wholesaler that you are investigating. Look for past complaints if any, or why stop here. Also contact the better business bureau or online scam complaints sites are scams.com. Also take advantage of local suppliers, artisans and manufacturer sourcing techniques to find products that you could sell easily in your online store or ebay.
While you don’t have to search on search engines for product suppliers (be aware that search engines are infested with scams that specialize on make you believe they are for real wholesale suppliers) the search engines could be useful to search for past complaints to your wholesale distributor prospect. So looking for product sourcing suppliers using search engines (ex. searching for 'china products' or 'wholesalers' or 'products to sell on ebay') is not your best way to find a good product source.
The way fake wholesalers (Middlemen) operate
The middlemen usually put up a website that contains all kinds of unrelated product lines, you sign with them (paying a small account setup fee, off course), then you proceed to place their products ads on your site; you receive orders from your consumers and in this step you send the order to this fake "wholesaler", and here comes the scam: This fake "wholesaler" in turn send the order to the REAL wholesaler and has it sent to your customer.
You end up paying more than you have to pay for the product (you end up with less profit), because the middleman is marking up the price to YOU. And this is just assuming that there is only ONE middleman between your store and the REAL wholesaler!!!
Take support from sourcing services
Yes, if you want to make a smart useful of your time, while searching for product sourcing information, why not consider yourself contact people who has been doing product sourcing for the products that you are selling. There are people who has been doing the hard work in order to find the real and genuine wholesale suppliers. Is just matter of weighing both sides of the scale: doing yourself (phone calls to manufacturer of products and chambers of commerce, maybe travelling to wholesaler physical address, etc) or use a REAL wholesale supplier database. As I said earlier, is just matter of considering the cost-benefit ratio of do-it-yourself or getting it done by people who specilize in a professional sourcing service. By the way this is the best product sourcing database I know of