Sourcing for Independence! [Introduction 1]

The United States Independence Day is fast approaching and we wanted to share with you some great ways to “Source for Independence”!

This is the first post in a series, so make sure to check them out as they get delivered to you! This is the introductory. The following posts in this series will contain a lot of helpful information for your business.

So what do we mean by Sourcing for Independence?

To Source means;
Obtain from a particular source or to find out where (something) can be obtained.

Independence means:
Freedom from the control, influence, support, aid or the like from others.

So Sourcing for Independence means finding reputable suppliers, to help your online business become successful, so you can be financially independent!

Most people start an online business to supplement their income as a part time job or they want to own their own business and work on it full time to be their main source of income.

However, you decide to do it, you need genuine reputable supplier sources for your chosen selling platform. Whether that is eBay, Amazon or on your own website, you need REAL wholesale sources supplying you with genuine wholesale products and real wholesale prices.

The basic supply chain is:
1. Manufacturers make the products and a lot of manufacturers will sell wholesale to retailers and others send their products to Authorized Distributors and never to retailers directly.

2. Authorized Distributors have large warehouses and offer products from different manufacturers. So you can get variety of products and brands with a distributor that you can’t get with working with the manufacturer directly. Authorized Distributors will sell to retailers and to wholesalers.

3. Wholesalers sell to retailers and also to other wholesalers, creating sub-wholesalers.

As you move down the supply chain, the wholesale prices increase. These companies have to make money too! So getting to the highest tier of the supply chain is where you find the best pricing.

It’s difficult to find genuine wholesale sources if you search online. Search results are full of middlemen, fake and fraud suppliers and they are GREAT at getting their sites to the top of the search engines because they are marketers, not wholesale suppliers. So don’t use keywords like wholesale products or dropshippers when searching online. Most legitimate suppliers do not go after these keywords, and rely on trade shows and Directories to get their names out there to retailers.

We have had many members of the years give us horror stories about companies they thought were genuine wholesale suppliers, but ended up being a middleman constantly upselling other services that they just NEEDED to have or a fake supplier that just ran away with their money.

So where do you find REAL wholesale sources willing to work with online retailers? Trade shows is a great start and that’s where we get most of the wholesalers in our Directory.

You can do this yourself of course! But there is a lot of legwork involved. Not all suppliers will work with online retailers and not all will dropship. So be prepared for a lot of NO’s.

Cut out all that extra work by getting a membership to our Directory of WBI Certified Wholesalers and Dropshippers. We have already done this work for you, and as everyone knows, Time=Money.