Amazon FBA Wholesale: Sourcing Your First Or Next Product to Sell At Volume

We live in an amazing time where we can start a business call Amazon FBA Wholesale. This is going to be the ultimate Wholesale For Beginners 2022 On Amazon FBA blog post, sharing two sourcing strategies where we will talk about finding your FIRST (OR NEXT) product to sell at volume.

Whether that is from home while working full time or even if you have a family with very little time. This blog post will show exactly how to source a winning product to sell in your Amazon FBA Wholesale business.

Amazon FBA Wholesale Warning

When it comes to building your wholesale business and looking for your first or next product, which is going to be a winning product which you could sell for potentially months and months, an amazing replenishable product and which meets all the criteria you are looking for, the first thing you need to be aware of is that it is going to be hard - it is hard to find a winning product at wholesale at volume, and that's just the nature of the business model. 

If winning wholesale product which you could buy, if you could buy pallets worth and do this very easily, then it is like printing money. People believe that wholesale is a get rich quick scheme, but it is not. It takes blood, sweat and massive action tears. For those of you who have already started with wholesale, you will know this, but for those who have only just started, or those who are looking to starting, do not go into the business model expecting gold, and lots of money quickly.

Amazon FBA Wholesale Sourcing Strategy 1

The first strategy is from supplier to Amazon. What you are essentially doing is trying to open a wholesale account, you are trying to find a supplier, being able to get in contact with that supplier, for example, going out on Google and typing in keywords to try and find them. 

You could go to trade shows. Trade shows are opening back up in person. You will be able to go to the trade shows, where there will be lots of different suppliers, and different stalls, where you can go and meet their sales reps, and have a look catalogues. 

If you would like to learn more about trade shows, check out the blog post below:

Top 10 Wholesale Tips for Attending Trade Shows and Opening New Accounts With Suppliers

Go onto the trade shows website, and see who is going to be there. Look at the names of the wholesalers and check out their websites, go onto their social media pages, and try and reach out to them. This way you could start to build a relationship with them.

Once you have opened the account with the wholesaler, there are going to be many ways that you can actually open that account. One way is that they may ask you for some sort of reference, they're going to want to know about your business, your business name, details of your whereabouts, your website, and they may potentially ask if you are selling on Amazon. Wholesalers have terms and conditions. That is the main difference between wholesale and online arbitrage. 

Online arbitrage is B to C, online retails will want to sell to customers, and that is where you as a seller are taking advantage of that. Whereas wholesalers are business to business (B to B). They want to sell to you, an eCommerce seller. 

If you would like to learn more about online arbitrage, check out the blog post below:

Online Arbitrage For Beginners: Why Amazon FBA?

Now, once you have got the account open, you then get the stock list - you can request the stock list. They may also have some clearance offers, they may send you some special offers, they may send you one-off promotions.

What you are essentially doing is going through a stock list, one by one. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack; you're going to be going through many products which may not be suitable for you. So, you are going to review those products to see if they match your criteria, and use the tools you have available to do this, e.g. Keepa. 

Over time, once you have started to build a strong relationship with your wholesale supplier, you could potentially mention to them about discounts. Asking if you would be able to get a 5%, 10% or 15%+ discount. 

This is the worst way that you can potentially find your first or second wholesale product. 

Amazon FBA Wholesale Sourcing Strategy 2

Now, moving onto the second. The second way is from Amazon to supplier. So, essentially what we are doing there is, we are looking on Amazon, and we are trying to find a product which is suitable for your wholesale business. So, you are looking for a product which is an everyday popular brand, it meets all of your criteria, you can analyse these particular products, they have some great sales, the pricing is higher and it looks like it is going to be a potential good price, you are looking at the competition, whether Amazon is selling. You are basically analysing a product before you have got the supplier for that particular product. 

If that particular product that you find by going onto Amazon, you may know that there are different categories within Amazon, there are different bestseller lists within Amazon, you can dig down deep into the categories and start looking for particular products which may be in interest to you, products which you feel could potentially be sold at wholesale.

 Then, you are going to get that title, you are going to search that title into Google with wholesale supplier. Let's say the item you have found is a shampoo, you are going to search the name of that shampoo onto Google with wholesale supplier. It is going to come up with many different suppliers which potentially stock, hold and promote. Then it is the case of trying to contact that wholesale supplier, open the account, and then go to the point where you find out what the price is. Is the price suitable for what you are trying to sell it at? If it is not, and it's too high, it it doesn't make it a winner, then you have got the potential to know what type of prices that you can actually try and negotiate. 

As you continue to build, and you build more and more relationships, and you start to spend more and more, then it starts to open the door to more and more. As you build that relationship, and you have got that custom, they are supplying you and they come to know that you are a really great customer of theirs and you repeat ordering, you are abiding to all their terms and services. Eventually, later, you could potentially negotiate better discounts. 

Further reading:

https://www.systemisefulfilment.co.uk/blog/every-online-arbitrage-wholesale-business-needs-this

https://www.systemisefulfilment.co.uk/blog/amazon-fba-wholesale-business-tips-after-quitting-job-moving-into-own-warehouses