Wholesale Suppliers
As your business grows, you have to start buying more and more from wholesale suppliers. Not only you will buy more products or materials from your current suppliers, but you will also start to buy wholesale products that you had been buying retail so far.
Although cheaper prices are always attractive, other factors arise in importance, because of the bigger amounts involved in wholesale purchases. Therefore you should start to classify your suppliers and learn to differentiate the good ones from the bad ones. Here are some tips.
A good wholesale supplier will have no problem in committing things in writing. I wouldn’t recommend you buy from a supplier that thinks the conversation was just enough. I once got one that said “we’ll if you think the price is right, THEN I will send it by e-mail.” If a wholesale supplier can’t send a simple fax or e-mail. How can you trust him or her with an important order of material that you need?
Also, a good wholesale supplier will be as specific as possible. Exactness is relative to each industry, for example, while bottles or cars can be specified to the unit, other products, like steel, can’t. Even so, some form of measurement has to be given. For example, you can specify that you will buy 150 tons of steel plus/minus 10%, since it’s almost impossible to produce raw steel in more exact quantities.
Another way to tell a good wholesale supplier from a bad one is that the good one will set dates AND respect them. This doesn’t just mean his or her visits, but the commitments of his or her company. If he says that the first delivery will arrive on Monday, it’d better arrive on Monday. If it arrives on Tuesday it can mean that he or she either didn’t respect his commitment, or that he or she lacks the power or means to engage his or her company in commitment.
This takes us to yet another way to tell if a wholesale supplier is good. A good wholesale supplier can make decisions on the spot. While it’s understandable that he or she would ask for time when a decision involves much more money than usual, if your supplier always says he or she will call you back, then it means you’re not talking with a decision maker. One time, when I asked an agent to take a decision in the moment, she just replied “both you and I are agents, and it doesn’t affect us because we just do what we’re told.” Talk about professionalism.
Finally, a good wholesale supplier will prove him or herself over time. While contingencies happen to all of us, they’re the exception, not the rule. If a wholesale supplier fails constantly, then you should really consider getting a different one, even if it means paying a bit more.
How do you find good wholesale suppliers?
Finding reputable and legitimate wholesale suppliers is of vital importance to a growing online business and could mean the difference between making a healthy profit and just breaking even. Luckily there are a number of companies out there, such as SaleHoo and Worldwide Brands that provide large databases of pre-screened suppliers for virtually any product. To learn more about this type of service, checkout this SaleHoo Review and WorldwidBrands Review.
If you are just looking for a dropshipping service, and don’t want the hastle of storing stock, packaging and posting etc, you might want to check out this Doba Review.
Other Resources
If you are considering building your own online store but are daunted by the amount of technical knowledge you might need, then SaleHoo have a new product on the market called SaleHoo Stores. This enables you to build an online store quickly and easily with no technical knowledge and could be a great way to kick start your online business. You can learn more about this store building software by visiting this SaleHoo Stores Review.
