If you're going to own a Home-based Internet Business, selling Products on the Internet, you have to find products to sell.
That's pretty basic, right? You can't sell products if you don't have any.
Now, let's assume that you're going to (properly!) ignore all the hucksters and snake-oil salesmen out there who promise you overnight riches on late-night TV Infomercials. Let's assume that you know better than to fall for the "instant business in a box" web sites that squeal and prance at you from all corners of the Internet.
Nevermind driving around to Garage Sales, picking up
knick-knacks for a dollar, and selling them for twenty bucks on eBay. That's OK,
but it takes way more of your time than it's worth. Only one person in a
million really makes a living doing that.
Forget about inventing a better mouse trap, making it in your garage, and earning a fortune selling it on your Internet Store. That only sounds good when the TV Guy from the Acme Invention Patent Company wants to sell you an "Inventor's Kit" that will make you rich. It sounds good, but
again, it's one in a million.
If you're going to have yourself a real, live,
honest-to-goodness successful Home-based Internet business, whether you
sell on an Internet Store or you sell on eBay, you need to
learn what Product Sourcing is.
This is a very important term, folks, so write it
down, tack it up on the fridge, do whatever it takes to remember it. Like the
Supply Line of an Army fighting far from home, your Product Sourcing is
the lifeblood of your Online Business.
What is Product Sourcing?
Product Sourcing is the act of finding
Sources of Products to sell.
If you're going to sell Products on the Internet, you need a steady, continuous Source of those Products. You need to be
sure that you can buy those Products at a genuine Wholesale Price, so
that you can make a Profit when you sell them to your customers at your Retail
Price.
That means that you have to find legitimate
Wholesale Product Suppliers that will work with a Home-based Internet
Business.
This is not as easy as it sounds.
Most real Wholesale Suppliers will not work with
you.
It's unfortunate, but true.
Most of the real Wholesale Suppliers out there do not want to sell products to
small, Home-based Internet Businesses. Why? Because as small businesses, we
don't have the money to order thousands of dollars worth of products 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, like Sears, Target, KMart, etc. 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!
That's why most Internet Lists of Wholesalers are
useless.
You've seen them
all over the Internet. Lists and "trade directories" claiming to contain
thousands of names of wholesale suppliers from the US, Mexico, Hong Kong,
Asia, the Philippines, etc.
Well, some of those lists
actually do contain thousands of names of wholesalers from those places.
So, what's the problem? Well,
there are actually several problems.
- Those printed lists and
"trade directories" are so rarely updated that huge numbers of those companies
listed aren't even in business anymore.
- Those so-called 'wholesalers'
in those printed lists and "trade directories" are not properly researched
and verified! They are jam-packed with Middlemen who will
charge you too much for your products.
- Most of the suppliers listed
in those printed lists and "trade directories" who are still in
business will not work with small, Home-based Internet Business Owners. Why?
Because as small business owners, we can't afford to spend thousands of
dollars each time we order! They require high minimum orders that make
it impossible to deal with them on a small scale.
Now, here's another little
roadblock for you (aren't you lucky!):
Most real Wholesalers you find in the Search
Engines will not work well for you!
There are, as I said, a ton
of fake wholesalers and middlemen advertised on the Internet, and in the
Search Engines. We'll talk about why they're fake in a later Chapter. For now,
though, it's important to realize that even when you find a Real
Wholesaler online, in a Search Engine, they are quite often bad for your
business.
Why?
When real wholesale companies venture out onto the
Internet, even with the best of intentions, they sometimes go to far.
When a wholesaler gets too well known on the
Internet, they get overexposed to millions of people. That
means that you get far too many other Internet Sellers like yourself
using them. That creates too much competition for their products for anyone to
make a decent profit.
But there's another issue. When Wholesale Suppliers
get over-enthusiastic on the Net, they start offering extras to their wholesale
customers, like Internet Stores built into their wholesale programs. You may
have seen them; Wholesalers that want to sell you a specialized Web Site that
contains their Products. There are a couple of problems with that as well.
First, most Wholesale Suppliers know little
to nothing about creating and running a Home-based Internet Business. That's not
what they do. These are Wholesale Suppliers, they are not Ecommerce experts!
They don't have the in-house expertise to create these kinds of programs. That
doesn't stop them, though. They try to do it themselves anyway. So, the
integrated Ecommerce solutions they offer on their sites are rarely successful
ones, because they're either making this stuff up as they go along, or they're
copying it from someone else who may not know what they're doing either.
So, the Wholesale Suppliers who do this are trying
to expand their sales by making it as easy as possible to sell their products
online, but because they're not Ecommerce experts, they end up actually making
things harder for their customers.
The second problem is that they have to spend money
creating these little instant-business programs. They have to dedicate a couple
of employees to run the show. They have to pay for that somehow, and where do
you think they make that money from?
They raise their wholesale prices.
Most of these wholesale companies who are also
ECommerce solution wannabes have two completely different price schedules. A
lower price schedule for their core wholesale business, which is selling loads
of wholesale products to large physical stores. Then a higher price structure
for their sales to Internet businesses, because they have to make back the money
they spend to develop and maintain these ECommerce business extras of theirs.
Of course, there are also several real
wholesalers advertising on the Net that don't offer these extra Internet Store
programs. What about them?
Well, they are a better bet, but they still have
part of that same problem.
When a Wholesale Supplier tries to create a
widespread internet presence for themselves, they still have to pay someone
in-house to manage all that search engine positioning and Pay Per Click
advertising. It costs them money to make themselves well-known on the
Internet.
As a business, they have to make that money back.
Income has to be greater than expenses in any business.
Wholesale Suppliers typically operate on a pretty
thin profit margin, so they're not going to make that money back easily on
increased sales volume, at least not at first. Pay Per Click advertising in the
Home Business market is expensive! So, once again, they raise their
wholesale prices to Internet sellers, to compensate for those costs.
In general, a wholesaler that can easily be found on
the Internet has to charge higher prices than a wholesaler who doesn't have that
large internet presence, because they're spending extra money to promote
themselves on the Net.
There are of course some exceptions, but there's no
easy way to tell who they are.
So, I've told you where not to find real
Wholesalers.
Where can you find them?
When you get into Product Sourcing, you're looking
for Wholesalers who are:
- Legitimate Wholesale Suppliers
- Not Overexposed
- Do not spend a great deal of money becoming
well-known on the Internet
- Do not sell extras like Internet Store
packages
That means you have to go to the Source (no
pun intended!)
If I wanted to sell Kodak
Cameras, for example, I'd go right to the top. I would call Kodak's Corporate
Headquarters in Rochester, New York, and ask for the Sales Department.
I'd tell their Sales Department
that I own a retail business, and I want to sell some of Kodak's products. I'd
ask them for a short list of their wholesale distributors in the US. They have
that information, and should be willing to give it to me. In fact, they'll
probably ask me where my business is located, and give me the name of a regional
sales director that I need to contact.
Then, I would call the
Wholesale Suppliers they give me, and ask if they'll sell to my Internet
business at Wholesale. That's the way you find real wholesalers that aren't
completely exposed to the entire Internet, and that gives you an edge in both
your profit margin and your competition.
Of course, you still have to
get through the issue of whether they will sell to a small Home-based Internet
Business. Most of them won't, so this Research takes a great deal of time, but
it is very important to your business that you do it right!
This is the kind of Research
that we at Worldwide Brands, Inc., have been doing non-stop for five years now.
This is exactly how we have
built our two Product Sourcing Directories; The Drop Ship Source Directory,
and The Light Bulk Wholesale Directory.
This EBook is not designed to
be a commercial for my company, but it's important for you to know that our Team
has already spent five years Researching thousands of Wholesale
Suppliers for just this kind of information. We're known all over the world as
the Internet's leading Product Sourcing Experts for Home-based Internet
Businesses like yours.
There are already hundreds
of pre-qualified Wholesale Suppliers listed in our Directories that have
already agreed to sell to Home-based Internet Businesses like yours at
real Wholesale Prices without charging those high minimum orders. Together,
they cover nearly two million products that you can sell on your Auctions
or Web Sites.
When you deal with Product
Sourcing, you are looking for either Drop Shippers, or Bulk
Wholesalers. Those are the two kinds of Wholesale Suppliers that you
can use to sell products online.
We'll talk about exactly what
those are in the next two Chapters.
NEXT >> Using Drop Shippers
