Sellers Reference Blog

A Fake Wholesale Distributor Verses A Real Wholesale Distributor

2007-01-09T20:31:00.000-05:00

The ability to spot a fake wholesale distributor can save you a lot of time, money, and trouble. There are many things to look out for when sourcing products from a potential wholesale distributor. If you are trying to find a wholesale distributor for your home business or just looking to add new items to your catalog then you need to be on the watch for the certain signs of a fake wholesale distributor to avoid disaster.

If you found your wholesale distributors’ website in a major search engine chances are that they are not a real factory direct source. The reason why is that most of all wholesale distributors do not have a budget to market their products over the web. They have contracts with large companies they ship products to regularly. They don’t need to spend money on marketing their products because the company that made the products will handle all the advertising. A wholesale distributors’ only job is to warehouse the products they receive from the factory and ship them out to the companies who are buying them for resell. It does not make any sense for them to spend money on marketing the products they have. This is why if you find a huge website full of products for resell, chances are it is a middleman buying the products in bulk, marking up the price a little bit, offering a drop shipping service to you, and getting you to do all the hard work for less money.

Another sign of a fake wholesale distributor is if they require a membership. Some will try to charge you a monthly fee to do business with you. This does not make any sense either. If you are buying products from a wholesale distributor they are making money from the products you are purchasing. Would you make your customers pay a monthly fee just to be able to buy your products in your store?

A real wholesale distributor needs your federal tax id number and resellers permit to do business with you. They need this so they do not have to charge you sales tax. When a potential wholesale distributor asks for this information you can count on them being a legit factory direct dealer.

A fake wholesale distributor could tell you that all you need to do is fill out a W-2 form and give them your social security number. They tell you that for the products you sell they will send you a check each and every month for your commissions. While this isn’t a bad thing, this sounds pretty easy. The easy way is the hard way though and you have to consider how many other people are selling the same products on the web at the same low prices. You will have a very hard time selling products from these types of dealers.

To run a successful ecommerce home business you need to eliminate any middleman and source products in bulk. A drop shipping supplier, even if they are a real factory direct source, will charge you more for their products and shipping services since you are not buying in quantity. To be successful you need the best price for quality products and the only way to obtain low prices are to source products from a real bulk wholesale distributor, one business to another. The easy road is the one most often traveled and you will learn that it leads no where.

Sellers Reference
Wholesale Distributors
Web marketing Strategies

Home Business Success with Bulk Wholesale Distributors

2007-01-09T20:30:00.000-05:00

Big companies with decent brand name products are hard for any home business manager to scout. You can find drop shipping suppliers at nearly every corner you turn on the web. The reason for this is simple as you will notice that you can hardly find any bulk wholesale distributors.

The number one reason for this is that most people who have contacts with a bulk wholesale distributor will build membership sites and offer their own drop shipping services in an attempt to sell more products from their inventory. This is a rip off for any home business because if you use drop shipping services, chances are that you are buying from someone who buys products from a bulk wholesale distributor and marks them up which makes it harder for you to sell.

You need to be buying at the same price as the person buying the products from the bulk wholesale distributor to be able to compete in the market place, to sell more products, and to turn a higher profit. Home business success starts at the supply and demand curve, so unless you are buying products from a bulk wholesale distributor and stocking your own inventory, chances are your profit margin is very small and your drop shipping supplier is the one making the real money for all your hard work.

Product sourcing research is a very dark road for most running a home business. Finding quality name brand products and rock bottom prices is key to a successful home business. You can find out more about product sourcing bulk wholesale distributors along with light bulk wholesale distributors from my website.

Light bulk wholesale distributors can offer any home business a decent benefit to obtaining great brand name bulk wholesale products at a very low minimum order. This is ideal for anyone selling a few products on auction sites.

Working with a bulk wholesale distributor will really give you room to grow. Being able to compete in the internet’s heavily saturated market is important. Buying from a bulk wholesale distributor is essential to home business success.

Sellers Reference
Wholesale Distributors
Web marketing Strategies

Fake Wholesale Distributors Are Targeting You

2007-01-09T20:22:00.000-05:00

Product Sourcing Online

If you are looking for products to sell online then you need to be aware of the thousands of resellers posing as wholesale distributors who are targeting your business. Your first intention may be to look through search engines to find wholesale distributors and products at wholesale price. This can be misleading once you understand how a search engine produces the search results you are asking for.

Search Engines

Search engines produce search results through the content of a site, not product sales pages or company information. Most of all the major search engines produce search results based on how often the keyword you are searching for appears on the site and how popular the site is based on how many other sites are linking to it. There are also a lot of other factors that apply that I will not go into here but search engines give results based upon the content of a site.

Fake Wholesale Distributors - Middle Men

If you were to search for wholesale distributors using a search engine you will notice that you will find barley any sites offering bulk wholesale goods. Most of all of them will show you a huge inventory of items that you can resell and offer you drop shipping services and some of which require a membership fee. This is the biggest sign of a middle man. A middle man will set between you and the real supplier and get a lot of other people to sell their goods for them; they will pose as a real wholesale distributor. They build their websites with enough content to get the search engines to pick up their website in their search results targeting people like you to do all their hard work for them.

Product Saturation

The problem with buying from a middle man like this is that not only does it cut into your profit but the products are also a lot harder to sell. If one of these fake wholesale distributors has about two hundred other people selling all the same products, most of which will be on eBay and other internet malls, then you will have to lower your price even more to compete. Everyone will be working against each other.

Real Wholesale Distributors

A real wholesale distributor is a company that receives goods from the manufacturer and stocks them in bulk to ship out to their major retailers for resell. A wholesale distributor does not advertise their products and really has no need or intention of advertising their business. They just stock products and ship them out to their retailers. The likelihood of finding a real factory direct wholesale distributor using a search engines is very slim.

Work From Home Scam

These middle men will tell you how you can make thousands of dollars every month working from your computer at home. They provide the products for you to resell and some will even provide web hosting and software to help you manage your business. Only a small percentage of people could actually make something like this work, even competing against some of the world’s biggest companies selling the same products. It takes a lot of time and money to advertise your business on the web and get a good flow of customers shopping in your store everyday. In some cases people end up spending more than they can make while others only make very little profit and deciding it isn’t worth its time and effort.

Product Sourcing Research

When searching for products to sell online you need to be buying from a real wholesale distributor if you want it to be worth your time and money. Finding real wholesale distributors involves a process called product sourcing research which you can find more information about from my site.

Sellers Reference
Wholesale Distributors
Web marketing Strategies

eBay Power Sellers Source Real Wholesale Distributors

2007-01-09T20:15:00.000-05:00

The secret behind every successful eBay power seller is not only their sales skills and reputation but their connections to real wholesale distributors. Sourcing products with real wholesale distributors is the basic need for any eBay power seller. Your business can only be as good as your wholesale distributors are to you.

Building Your Reputation

To be successful at selling a lot of products on eBay you have to build a good reputation with the eBay consumer base. Customers are more willing to buy from someone who has a flawless reputation rather than someone who has no reputation at all. I personally would rather spend a few extra dollars to buy the same product from someone who had a perfect reputation rather than from someone who has a bad reputation or no reputation at all. Keeping a perfect customer satisfaction rating is very important to all power sellers. It takes a while to build a good reputation and you may even need to take some losses just to keep it perfect but it is well worth it for the long term.

Wholesale Distributors

The key to being a successful eBay power seller is having a real wholesale distributor with quality in demand products at your finger tips. You can be successful with a wholesale distributor who offers drop shipping to your customers but you can slowly gain scars on your reputation from some of the problems that can arise from drop shipping services. Using bulk wholesale distributors can grant you full control over your business. You will always know what you have available in stock and you can control the shipping of the product. This is the more professional approach because you can personalize your packages and you can get better prices on your products when you buy in bulk.

Multiple Wholesale Distributors

When you hook up with a wholesale distributor do not just try to sell all the products in their inventory only. Sell only the products that best fit the needs of your target customers and try to find more products of the same kind for your customers from other wholesale distributors. Having a good selection can give you an advantage over your competition. Some people shop for low prices while other people shop for a quality brand. Having two products of the same kind made by different companies can give you the ability to make sales to each type of shopper.

Real Wholesale Distributors

A real wholesale distributor is a company who ships products in from the factory and then ships them out in bulk quantity to retailers all around the world. Wholesale distributors do not advertise their business to the consumer world and any of the products they carry are not advertised and marketed by them. The odds of finding a real wholesale distributor instead of middlemen by using a search engine are very slim. The way a wholesale distributor promotes their business is through word of mouth from business to business and through trade shows which are held annually in most of the worlds major cities.

These are the familiar keys to success as an eBay power seller. If you check the records of most of eBay’s power sellers you will see that they carry only the products for their target market and their products are available in different brands. The power sellers with the highest numbers will always have the best reputations with their customers and usually keep a mailing list and database of their paying customers.

Sellers Reference
Wholesale Distributors
Web marketing Strategies

Marketing Strategies Defined For Women

2006-09-12T03:47:00.000-04:00

If you sell anything online that a stereotypical woman would buy then chances are that seventy percent of your customers are either women or influenced by a woman. Women dominate shopping malls and retail outlets and the rate of woman becoming comfortable buying products online is growing. Most woman use the internet to find information about a product before they go to the mall with their friends.

Women need to be informed and feel like they have been informed before they will purchase anything. Adding a picture of a woman along side your content or around your products is not good enough. If a woman feels she has all the details and knows that your price is the best price around she is likely to make the purchase. Your website should have a sales page for each individual item explaining in detail about the item they are viewing, an article explaining the purpose of the item, images of the item in use, specifications, and any warranties the product may carry. Your thank you page should show appreciation and reassurance that you are ready to meet any needs your customers have. A good strategy to keep in touch with your customer service is to have small surveys and questions at the bottom of your thank you page asking about service and what could be better. Always get customers names, addresses, and email addresses. Keeping a customer database to promote too is not only one of the cheapest marketing strategies used today but it is essential to keeping in contact with customers and letting them know you appreciate their business and you want to them to come back. This will help ensure loyalty and trust in your company which will bring in more sales.

Some of the misconceptions businesses have about how to market to woman include using feminine colors like pink and purple. The reason this is bad is because not only does it turn away any male customers but it also is offensive to woman as they feel targeted instead of informed. A website selling perfumes and lotions targeted for women with a pink background is not a good idea. A clean professional look, with the proper information and details to support the product you are selling along with customer appreciation are all that a woman needs.

Sellers Reference
Wholesale Distributors
Web marketing Strategies

The #1 Missed Marketing Opportunity For Home Businesses

2006-09-12T03:43:00.000-04:00

This is something it took me a year or so to actually see the big picture. This is a practice you will see that is familiar if you look around at most of the worlds major companies. Think about the last time you called and ordered a pizza from Papa Johns. They answered the phone promoting their newest pizza. They have a database with your name, phone number, and street address giving them detail about your previous orders. After they repeat your order to you they try to do what they call “suggestive selling”, which is asking you if you need any cheese sticks or sodas, all based upon your order history. If all goes well and you get a nice looking hot pizza within the time they quoted you over the phone you are going to order from them again. On top of all this, Papa Johns has sent me special flyers from my hometown store that sells me my pizza, with special promotional items and discounts for that store specifically.

A recent study I read revealed that fifty percent of the sales for each item sold was from previous customers. Most companies spend more time and money into keeping existing customers than they spend on getting new ones. Once a customer has bought from you, they feel they can trust you, and that is very important. When the trust is already established something as simple as sending your customers email promoting your brand new product can produce a lot of sales. If you do not keep a customer database record or do not have a newsletter column on your website then you should consider planning on investing something into your customers instead of using a lot of effort trying to target new ones. Think about it, if you have a customer database with ways to reach your customers then that second and third sale you make to them cost you very little for advertising. This is how to get better sales, if you sell a quality product and place heavy importance on your customer satisfaction compliance, you will be able to sell almost anything at even higher prices.

Sellers Reference
Wholesale Distributors
Web marketing Strategies

The Easy Way Is The Hardest Way

2006-09-12T03:41:00.000-04:00

If you have a deal with a company that tells you that you can sell their products without needing to be a legal business with a federal tax id number or a reseller’s permit, then you are spending a lot of time for very little.

It is nice to throw up a few ads for a company and sell a few products for them and get paid for it without having to deal with customer satisfaction, a bunch of legal paperwork, and merchant accounts. All you have to do is set back and wait for your check to come in the mail. Doing this will not make you rich and at the same time it probably isn’t really making you much of anything for the amount of time you have invested into promoting this companies products.

I know this because you are dealing with a middle man and the prices you have to sell these products for leaves you very little profit when you see that there is a lot more people selling the same products for less than you were told to sell it at. Think about how many more people are selling those same products in the same market as you for the same company. Unless there is a high demand for the product you are promoting, let’s face it; you are not going to make much if anything at all. These companies show you testimonials from clients who probably receive some sort of special discount and have made a decent chunk of money in the last couple of months. They want you to think it is easy and that everyone is doing it so that you will try and make them more money.

The internet is a competitive market with larger companies selling products with huge advertising budgets down to even smaller eBay power sellers with personal websites that have perfect customer satisfaction. These companies are guaranteed their return business because they have a targeted customer database to promote to. People will always pay a little more to buy from someone they trust. It takes a lot of time to build a good reputation and keeping in contact with customers. I know from my own experience that over 50% of my sales for each product were from customers who have bought from me in the past. All I had to do was send them an email promoting my new product and since the trust was already established a lot of them purchased it.

You will never make any real money unless you do it the way that everyone else does it. Start a real legal business, find products from a real wholesale supplier, and start building your reputation threw customer satisfaction. After you have done that then you are set and you have the power to make money with very little effort. It takes a lot of time though, and hard work before you can reach this level. Most people have asked me what they need to do to get a legal business started and in response to that I am going to share a book written by Chris Malta of Worldwide Brands that explains the process of getting a legal business established. This book covers everything from the business entity types, business bank accounts, merchant account, federal tax, and state tax. This book is available for download from my site for free.

Do not look to the search engines for products to sell. Once again you will find nothing but middle men who are targeting you as a potential client. Real wholesale suppliers do not have a budget to advertise there company to small business owners and home businesses. You will not find them listed in the search engines. What you have to do is called product sourcing research which you can find information about from my website.

Building your reputation is what makes sales happen. You will never make much if anything at all unless you do it the right way like every other business in the world. You must be dedicated and do things the hard way now so that it is easy later on. Success does not happen over night and is never an easy road. You must climb the mountain before you can rest at the top.

Sellers Reference
Wholesale Distributors
Web marketing Strategies

Product Sourcing for Wholesale Suppliers and Distributors

2006-09-12T03:39:00.000-04:00

Attending Trade Shows Yourself

Trade shows are a very good way to come out with a lot of information about a lot of different companies selling products. Be prepared when you attend a trade show by knowing what your market research has shown you about specific products for your niche. While you are there pick up anything you do not know much about and research it later, you may run into an idea. Trade shows are typically held at a convention center in most major cities throughout the world and the dates of these events can be found at export.gov/tradeevents.html

Buying Information from a Product Sourcing Expert

If you do not have the time or money to attend trade shows you may want to consider sourcing products from a product sourcing expert. This is a very flexible method because you can get immediate information on wholesale suppliers and distributors for certain types of products with specific shipping methods. When searching for a product sourcing expert you want to consider how credible their sources are. How far their reach is and how much information they can offer you. Some product sourcing experts may only have sourced products in certain markets and may have some really good suppliers in mind for that market but fail to support anything else related. From my website is a link labeled product sourcing in the navigation bar which can tell you the top 5 things you need to know about product sourcing.

Contacting Wholesale Suppliers

If you are not used to contacting suppliers and knowing what questions to ask then you may want to practice on some companies you have found at trade shows that you don’t really care to do business with. The two most important questions to ask when contacting a wholesale supplier are:

What shipping methods are offered?

What are your products prices?

Always be professional sounding and never to casual and relaxed. Being prompt and to the point lets them know that this is about business and you are not wasting their time. Sending a letter or an email after you have contacted these wholesale suppliers lets them remember you and can give you positive recommendations for your better suppliers.

Sellers Reference
Wholesale Distributors
Web marketing Strategies

Drop Shipping Supplier Or Bulk Wholesale Supplier?

2006-09-12T03:36:00.000-04:00

If you are looking to expand your drop shipping business or trying to decide what is best for your new home based business then you may want to consider the differences between using a drop shipping supplier versus a bulk wholesale supplier.

Drop shipping suppliers are nice and easy because you do not have to carry any inventory yourself, you don’t have to worry with packing products and shipping them out to your customers, and you can order as few or as many times as you wish. I have always had a few problems with drop shipping services though. Imagine your customer places an order from you off your website or wins an auction of yours. You exchange money and then call your supplier and tell them to send that product to your customer, with rush shipping, and they tell you that they do not have that product in stock. Imagine your customer calls you talking about broken parts, defective electronics, or a box that has been slightly crushed and you call your supplier about it and they tell you that they can only warranty products packed and shipped in bulk. These are only some of the problems I have had with drop shipping suppliers, however, most of the time they can make business a little easier.

A bulk wholesale supplier can really give you an edge, especially on ebay. These suppliers can offer you a lot better prices than anyone else which can make your products have a very competitive price in your market. These products are fully backed with warranties and guarantees, direct from the factory. This is the way to go if you really want your home business to increase in size and sales. It is more work but it is worth it in the long run. One problem many home businesses have is that they do not have enough thousands of dollars to purchase the minimum quantity order for bigger products. Getting a loan to carry against these products can be risky in a lot of ways. In my experience, buying in bulk is the best route for any home business ready to expand or just starting out.

No matter which you choose to do, they both have their advantages and disadvantages. If you really want to increase sales and customer service compliance then you need to consider buying in bulk like the rest of the heavy weight sellers and be in competition with them instead of with the millions of the little guys.

Sellers Reference
Wholesale Distributors
Web marketing Strategies

Why Drop Ship Suppliers and Wholesale Distributors Can’t Find You

2006-09-12T03:34:00.000-04:00

There are thousands of Drop Ship Suppliers and Wholesale Distributors who would love to do business with your small home based ecommerce business, but the problem is they do not know where to find you. If you scan threw the search engines you will find Home Business Starter Kits, Wholesale Outlets offering Drop Shipping services on over priced products, a hand full of get rich quick schemes which never work, and a giant directory of middle men posing as Wholesale Suppliers and Drop Shipping Suppliers.

The reason that real Wholesale Suppliers and real Drop Ship Suppliers cannot find you is because they do not have the money allocated to market their services and product line to small home businesses. They spend their marketing expenses on promoting their new products to their current retailers, maintaining a good business relationship with what is bringing in the guaranteed revenue. Ask anyone in marketing and they will tell you that a business will always protect its investment into its customers because trust has already been established from the customer who brings repeat business and more sales.

The biggest misconception I receive in my inbox is that Wholesale Suppliers and Drop Shipping Suppliers do not have time to waist on small home based businesses and care little for those sales. This is far from the truth and I will give you one good reason why; Consistency. A good relationship, be it with a consumer or another business, is very critical for maintaining that trust that has grown. If a Wholesale Supplier or a Drop Shipping Supplier can consistently send goods and maintain a positive relationship with their clients their growth is limitless, along with their client base.

You must find them though, and once you contact a real supplier, you will see that they will give you the same consistent product and customer care solutions that any other professional organization would expect. Finding them is never easy, especially if you are looking for a certain type of product or certain kind of supplier. Trade shows are typically unsuitable to the needs of most new home business entrepreneurs which can make it even more difficult to find suppliers for a new home based business.

In conclusion, real Wholesale Suppliers and real Drop Shipping Suppliers just do not have a budget to promote their services and products to new clients, especially small home based businesses.

Sellers Reference
Wholesale Distributors
Web marketing Strategies