This week I talk about How To Find Amazon FBA Wholesale Suppliers. This is an extension of the discussion from last week about Amazon Wholesale — the business model that I have been working on this year .
How To Find Amazon FBA Wholesale Suppliers Episode Show Notes
What goes first: Supplier selection or product selection?
There are two methods to go about this and the method that I used when I first started Amazon FBA wholesale was to just go and look for wholesalers without regard to the products that they sell. I picked a niche: sporting goods, outdoors and home. It’s a broad one, I know, but I set my eyes on anything that fell into that category because those are the products that sell well on Amazon and are not gated. When I say gated, I am referring to the fact that there are some items in Amazon which require credentials or experience to sell. For example, you have to prove that you're a legitimate retailer to sell diamond jewelry on Amazon. That’s a bad place to start your FBA business.
Finding Suppliers
One way to find suppliers without regard to the exact products that they sell is to go find a trade show where suppliers or wholesale distributors attend. Get the attendee list for those trade shows and you'd be amazed at the number and size of these trade shows. They rent booths and find customers this way. It’s their version of lead generation.
You can walk the aisle and talk to these suppliers about the list of things they sell and their pricing or you can find a distributor online, contact them by email or call them up on the phone.
In many cases, they will send you a list and in some cases, they will ask you for some additional information to prove to you are a real business.
Usually, the lists that are super useful have a UPC code, which will enable you to look the item up on Amazon and she information such as pricing and other data to figure out whether that item is profitable or not.
Finding Products
You can also do this the other way and this is often referred to in the industry as reverse wholesale sourcing. This is where you find a product then figure out who the wholesaler is.
If you see a knife sharpening kit while walking through the sporting goods store, for example. You can snap a picture of the product and the UPC code and Google it to get information about the manufacturer to be able to get hold of them. They would respond that you can either buy from them directly or from authorized distributors.
When you contact that wholesale distributor, a good introduction can go like: “Hey, I was talking to XYZ manufacturer and they suggested I contact you regarding purchasing their products. I'm interested in buying and wanted to ask how I can do that. Please send me a list of all the stuff that you sell”.
That’s it! If you're thinking about this Amazon wholesale business, this one demystifies where your suppliers will come from.
Links Mentioned In This Episode
- Amazon FBA Wholesale Explained [LNIM155]
- The Late Night Internet Marketing Community on Facebook Groups
- Subscribe in iTunes
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How To Find Amazon FBA Wholesale Suppliers — Transcript
In Texas baseball goes from absolutely terrible and kids that – I won’t say they shouldn’t be playing baseball, but maybe some of them are playing because their parents are making them – and all the way up to kids that you look and think, “Wow. I have no idea how it’s possible that that kid is only 11 or 12. He should be playing on television.” It runs the whole gamut along those lines.
Our team is, like most teams, somewhere in the middle. We’re a pretty good baseball team. Sometimes we play teams that are absolutely amazing. This weekend was one of those cases where we ran up against a team that was just flat out better than us by a wide margin.
We played a double header against this team. We’re in a double header league. We threw our best pitcher out there for the first game, I’ll say our most successful pitcher right now. That pitcher had a good outing and we still lost the game. It was a close game for most of the game, as we started to get tired and started to get into our bullpen a little bit, we ended up losing the game, but it was a reasonably close game.