Finding the Right Wholesaler for Your Business

Finding the right wholesaler for your retail store or web store can be tricky business. There are literally hundreds of "middlemen" waiting to prey upon hapless startups looking for cheaper products to resell in their stores. Middlemen are companies disguising themselves as legitimate wholesalers. In actuality, all middlemen do is purchase products from wholesalers, mark up the product significantly and resell them to you. If you're opening a business, you should know that the cheaper the product you purchase, the larger the profit margin when you resell. That is why middlemen are so dangerous. They literally rob you of your profits. Sometimes their products are marked up so high that the product is basically unsaleable in your store. Also, middlemen tend to charge a monthly fee for access to their "warehouses" that also cut into your profit. Legitimate wholesalers never charge monthly fees or sign up fees. Legitimate wholesalers MAY require a minimum order and reorder amount, whether it's monetary or the number of products you have to purchase. One reason middlemen seem so attractive sometimes is because they commonly offer "dropshipping" as an incentive to get you to sign up. Dropshipping is also called "blind shipping". You place the item on your website or eBay, and when a customer purchases it for your marked up price, you simply pay the dropshipper for the product and they ship it straight to your customer. No money out of your pocket outside of the nominal dropship fee. The problem is that you can't get many popular name brand products to dropship for you. Dropshipping is also a problem if your item sells, then you find out that the item is out of stock at the dropshipper. With all these problems in place, how do you get good products at a reasonable price?