Finding Suppliers for Your Inventory for Retail Businesses

Now that you have decided on your niche and identified your markets, it's time to find suppliers to stock your shelves or your website.

You can find wholesale lots for just about anything you want to sell on eBay, liquidation, and Craig's List. We found these useful after we had exhausted our supplies of everything around the house that we were willing to sell, when we were just getting started selling on eBay.

We also made the rounds of rummage sales, flea markets, Goodwill, discount, and liquidation sales, etc. This required a lot of time consuming chasing around for just a few items on an occasional basis. That was OK at first for eBay for a wide variety of items. Once we decided on a niche, we needed more dependable suppliers of quality merchandise.

World Wide Brands has a list of 100% Certified Dropshippers, Light Bulk & Volume Wholesalers. They verify their sources.

We found some great long term sources through them and we were able to keep our websites well stocked with some unique quality products as a result. We went for the lifetime membership. Even though we don't own any websites at present, we felt it was well worth the $299 investment.

You could stock your store with dropshipped products only and that is a good way to get started if you don't have the money to invest in inventory. Even with legitimate dropshippers, (and there are many out there who aren't legitimate) there are some drawbacks to it though. You can't control when your customer will get their products. It's harder to answer any questions about the products if you have never actually seen and used the products yourself. Your profit is almost always less because you don't get as good of a discount as someone who is buying the inventory directly and in bulk.

Some advantages to dropshipping are that you don't have to stock and store the inventory; you don't have the initial outlay; the company fulfills the orders so you don't have to worry about shipping. It's a great way to test market a new product you have never before offered to see how well it sells to your customers before you invest in it.

Be very careful about who you get as a dropshipper though. You can get badly burned. If the product is not as described, a knockoff, broken, or never shipped, your customer will come to you for resolution and if the dropshipper is not legitimate, you will be the one who ends up losing your reputation.

I would strongly encourage using World Wide Brands for reputable dropshipping sources at least when you are first getting started.

We mostly offered products we bought and sold from light bulk wholesalers on our active dog site. In fact we only used one dropshipper. We just felt more comfortable being in control of the sale from start to finish.