serious ebay traders - any wholesale advice?

geordie_joe

DKLS wrote: »

Wholesalers are easy to find, and most even easier to get into. Depends what your interested in selling, but I find big events like the Spring and Autmn Fair, pretty good, there are on average 4000 suppliers at each event.

In my experience real wholesalers are harder to find than dodo bird.

What you can find is companies pretending to be wholesalers. Their prices are rarely good.

A wholesaler will not allow you to see their prices until you have sent then proof that you are a genuine retailler who is trading. They will want references, copies of your company cheque etc.

Why? Because they need to know you are a genuine retailler to protect their trade.

Suppose you bought an item from a shop for £80 and then found a wholesaler was selling the same item for £10. You would not be happy knowing the shop bought it for £10 and sold it to you for £80.

You may be upset with the shop, but the shop is going to be a lot more upset with the wholesaler.

This is the reason real wholesalers hide their prices and hide themselves. They do not want the general public to find out their prices and go to great lengths to ensure they don't.

If you ever find a wholesaler that offers prices like

1 item £100 each
10+ items £90 each

they are not real wholesalers. Real wholesalers DO NOT OPEN BOXES. This means if they buy a box containing 12 items you can only buy 12 items or mulitples of 12 items from them. They will never open a box of 12, sell you 5 and hope someone else come along and buys the other 7. To them it is a waste of time and money.

To a real wholesaler a box containing 12 widgets is just one item. The people they sell to can affords to buy 12 widgets and (more importantly) have the retail outlet to shift (sell to the public) 12 widgets. If you can't afford to pay for, or don't have the facilities to shift 12 widgets then a real wholesaler will boot you out so fast it will make your eyes water.

All ebay sellers say "never reveal your supplier" and this is right, but they are usually sole traders, often just trying to make a bit of extra cash. You should see the lengths companies who have thousands of employees to think of go to to protect their suppliers. No real wholesaler would ever give anything away to anyone they weren't 100% sure was a genuine trader and not just someone who thinks they can sell on ebay. They may give up selling on ebay and try selling the wholesalers details instead.

Trust me, real wholesalers do two things. They do everything in their power to prevent the general public or would be sellers finding out their prices and the other thing they do is nothing.

Anything they do costs them money, so they do nothing. They wont post you goods and often they won't even help you out with the goods you've just paid cash for. They don't pay people to stand around waiting for a customer to help, if you bought something you can't lift and didn't think to bring a trolley then it's your fault. To provide help would increase their costs and they don't do anything that will do that.

RFW

The best advice I can give is to NOT use the internet to find wholesalers. Most of the wholesalers I know/deal with have closed/private websites or none at all, they don't attract or want to attract buyers from Google searches.

Try a local Yellow Pages/Thomson Local or some periodicals mentioned. Finding someone locally is the best idea.

Know your market, know your prices, know your buyers, know your competition (or better still don't have any!).

Don't pay out any more money than you need to and be careful.

Oh and as I always say on these posts, you could do worse than buying on wholesale section on Ebay, there are some genuine auctions on there.

RFW

geordie_joe wrote: »

Anything they do costs them money, so they do nothing. They wont post you goods and often they won't even help you out with the goods you've just paid cash for. They don't pay people to stand around waiting for a customer to help, if you bought something you can't lift and didn't think to bring a trolley then it's your fault. To provide help would increase their costs and they don't do anything that will do that.

You deal with some unfriendly businesses.

All my suppliers deliver be it by the pallet or by the container.

Most major retailers import their own goods now and have it packed, etc overseas, there are fewer and fewer wholesalers to deal with. In the last ten years around 30-40 major wholesalers in Manchester have closed, it is an ever changing market. I genuinely wouldn't reccomend anyone trying it unless they really knew what they were doing. You can buy 10,000 of a line at a great price one day, only to find it selling in Asda or Wilkinsons or wherever the next day at less than you paid.