How To Find Wholesalers, Dealers, and Distributors
When it comes to running your own eBay business, one of your main concerns is finding a reliable source of quality products to list. This is where wholesalers, dealers, and distributors can become your best friends. Finding a good wholesaler, dealer, or distributor isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but I’m going to give you the information you need to help you accomplish this all-important task.
The tricky thing about locating a good wholesaler, dealer, or distributor for your business is that the best resources for finding these businesses usually aren’t available online. Sure these business have websites, but you usually have to contact them personally to obtain inventory lists, pricing, and place orders. Your best offline tools for locating what you need are the Yellow Pages and the B2B Yellow Pages. Look under the genre of product you want first (for example, “home furnishings”), and then look for entries followed by “wholesaler,” “dealer,” or “distributor.”
Another useful offline resource is the Thomas Register, which is a book similar to the B2B Yellow Pages, that allows you to look up resources by company name, market or industry, brand, product name, service, or regional area. The great thing about the Thomas Register is that you can also access it for free online at www.thomasregister.com. Although this resource is available to you online, most wholesalers will be reluctant to work with you over the Internet. So, once you have found the appropriate contact information for your prospective partner, call them up or send them fax, rather than contacting them through email.
Search engines are another online resource that you can use to find wholesalers, dealers, and distributors, although you must careful of the way you go about searching for them here. To find the best resources on the search engines, simply search by the terms “wholesale + [name of the product you’re looking for].” Be sure to put these terms in quotations, too, as this will help you find only wholesalers, rather than retailers. You can also search by “[name of the product you’re looking for] + distributor,” which should also return some helpful results.
If you want to find a wholesaler for a product that you could buy at a store, simply locate the product that you’re interested in ordering from a wholesaler, and then look on the back of the product’s packaging for the name and address of its manufacturer. You don’t even necessarily have to waste money buying the product in the store if you don’t want to. Just jot down the information that you need in order to contact the manufacturer, and be on your way. For every large manufacturer that you find, you can almost guarantee that there are at least a few smaller distributors working to supply that manufacturers’ products to businesses just like yours.
Sometimes, these smaller distributors are a bit harder to find. While many large manufacturers, like Kenmore Appliances or Limited Brands, have in-depth websites that you can use to search for just about anything, their lists of smaller distributors are typically nowhere to be found. To locate these distributors as quickly as possible, use the contact form provided on the manufacturers’ websites.
You can then ask them to forward the proper information to you regarding their distributors. Be sure to explain that you are a retailer looking to invest in their products, and they will be eager to send over the appropriate contact details. Sometimes, manufacturers will go a step further with their customer service and forward your email on to the distributor, so that they may contact you directly. This is quite a common practice, so if you receive a phone call from an unfamiliar phone number, be sure to take the time to answer. It could be your future success calling!
