Wholesale Scam Alert! Be Scam Smart and Protect Your Online Business

We will say this VERY clearly:

A REAL Wholesale Supplier does not charge a setup fee or membership fee just to do business with you!

ANY company that wants you to buy your store's products from them, and wants you to pay a setup or membership fee, should be AVOIDED at all cost!

Almost without exception, these companies have raised their so-called "wholesale" product prices so high that you will never be able to compete on the internet. Your prices will have to be so much higher than anyone else's that you will never make any real money.

And guess what? You don't get to SEE these companies "wholesale" product prices until AFTER they have your money! See how that works? There will be a NO REFUND policy. Bet on that!

Understand that a drop ship fee is NOT a membership or setup fee. A drop ship fee is a handling fee that gets tacked onto shipping. Drop ship fees typically range from $1 to $5. Which is a completely honest fee that is needed for the suppliers to take the time to break apart cases of products, re-package them and ship them for you.

• They put up a site that contains all kinds of unrelated product lines, and tell you they'll drop ship for your online business
• They may charge a small account setup fee.
• You sign up with them, thinking that they are an actual wholesale distributor, and you place their products for sale on your site.
• Your customer orders a product from you, and you send the order to this fake "drop shipper".
• That fake "drop shipper" in turn places the order with the REAL wholesale supplier that dropships, and has it sent to your customer.
• You end up paying a lot more than you have to for the product, because the fake "dropshipper" is marking up the price to YOU.
• You lose profits that should be yours.

Many of these people are very clever.

Their sites look legitimate and they present themselves well. All they really are is just another middlemen that is sponging off your hard work. You DON'T need them.

Of course that company was a Wholesale Product Sourcing Company themselves, and gave their own company the best review. Looking at the review website though, you'd never know that it was actually owned by the company that gave themselves the top review. It was built to look like an independently owned review website. That opened the floodgates! Internet Marketing Affiliates, which are people who make money by advertising other companies' products, caught onto that idea. So-called "independent Review" sites began popping up like canker sores all over the Search Engines. The majority of these sites are NOT independent, and do not give accurate reviews.

The Products that get the "Top Reviews" on these sites are usually the products that pay the "Review Site" owner the highest commission! It doesn't matter that the products getting the "Top Review" are junk products and most of the time the "reviewer" hasn't even seen the product. There are very FEW honest review sites where the owners actually have purchased and reviewed the product.

Some of them even have names that sound like the names of famous, well-known companies, in a sad attempt to associate themselves with legitimacy.

Again, we knew we were getting substandard information. We've seen these things floating around for YEARS. But just for the sake of doing our research before telling you what they are really like, we bought them. These printed lists and online "Directories" of Drop Shippers and Bulk Wholesalers have been circulating the same, tired old listings around and around among themselves for years. If you think you can make money selling customized return mailing labels, or novelties like fake vomit and dribble glasses or used books from some dingy old warehouse, then by all means, give it a try. They all claim to contain "hundreds" or "thousands" of companies who will drop ship for you. Some of them actually do contain hundreds of listings, but that's easy. Once again, just go to a search engine and type in "wholesale" and copy the first 500 results you get. Then slap them in a rag-print magazine or website and call it a "Directory". Same result.

Our Research Manager actually spent a month trying to contact ALL 202 "drop ship" listings in one of the oldest and most well known of these and only 18 of them responded. Only 2 of them (TWO out of 202!) were real dropshippers. The 18 companies who did respond didn't know they were even listed in this "directory".

If you have purchased access to other online "directories", you will also see on their supplier listings information like "unconfirmed" or "not known". But these companies also advertise that they verify companies like we do here at Worldwide Brands Inc. Ask yourself one question. If they have "verified" this company, why does the information say "unconfirmed" or "not known"?

When we research wholesale suppliers, we contact EACH AND EVERY COMPANY WE LIST. Them we ASK THEIR PERMISSION to list them. After we verify that they are a REAL wholesale supplier, we enter them in our Directory of WBI Certified Wholesalers and list their products, brand names, email addresses, phone numbers, physical and mailing addresses, contact person, credit information, ordering procedure, etc…

NONE of these other so-called "directories" do anything remotely like what we do, unless of course they are stealing our hard work. (We've caught them in the past!) And we're constantly amazed that they get away with it.

We've checked out these sites. Over and over again, we see them listing companies that we've turned down for inclusion in the WBI Directory of Certified Wholesalers. Middlemen, companies that charge large "membership" fees and then give you over-inflated price lists in return, companies that require minimum orders in the THOUSANDS of dollars.

The producers of these sites are simply hoping to get people to click on them so that they can claim high numbers of visitors, and sell advertising space. We've never seen anything useful on one of these irresponsible excuses for an informational site, no matter how sincere they claim to be, or how many false "testimonials" they list.