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Where Can I Get That?
By businessbroad | August 21, 2006
Ok, so distributors are great and all, but what if you see a product you just have to sell. How do you figure out where to buy it? There are a couple of great methods you can try, but sadly, they’re not 100% guaranteed. Sometimes you may have to admit that something is not available to you.
Scenario One: You see a hot item in a catalog or website and you want to resell it. What do you do?
You COULD buy a sample to see if you can find a label or plant name. I wouldn’t recommend it, though. A good detective can figure out most anything in this day and age.
First, check the photo. See if you can view a smal label anywhere. Good catalogs rarely leave any way to tell, but sometimes they slip through. If it’s an online photo, you may be able to download it and blow it up a bit.
Your second technique should be a good internet search. Use all the likely keywords you can think of. It’s hard at first, but you’ll get better as time goes on. Remember than an exact match is best obtained with quotation marks around the query terms that you want to find exactly. You may get lucky and find the manufacturer, or at least a retailer that gives more information about the product.
If you don’t have any luck that way, try calling or e-mailing the company. You’ll probably get customer service, but if it’s a small company, you may get someone higher up. In most cases, telling them that you want to buy the same item and compete with them won’t go over well.
Instead, tell them you want to know the manufacturer’s name for quality or materials purposes. I like to make up something about fabric allergies, metal sensitivity, wick composition because of parrots in my home, etc. They won’t usually give you contact information, but a name is really all you need in most cases.
If that angle doesn’t work, check to see if they have a special product number. More often than not, that’s the last part of the UPC. Searching that exact string of numbers will often turn up the product where other methods have failed. At the least, it may give you another company to try to milk the information out of. This is detective work, remember.
If all else fails, it may be necessary to buy a sample. You might be saying, “Why go to all that trouble when I want a sample anyway?”
The answer is simple. If and when you do find a manufacturer, they’ll usually be willing to hook you up with a sample or two for review/test marketing purposes. We’ll talk more about how to get them to do that later.
Anyway, before you buy a sample, make sure you have a pretty good idea of whether or not this product would possibly be available to you as a reseller. If you see them on a lot of sites or in a lot of catalogs, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to get it for resale. On the other hand, if you see it in the Victoria’s Secret catalog, it is probably an in-house line that they don’t like to share. Which brings us to…
Scenario Two: You want to resell an item that’s not available for resale
Just because you can’t buy it new to resell doesnt mean you’ll never be able to get it. This is where closeout dealers and liquidators come in. Unfortunately, it’s less of a precise science, and you may have difficulty obtaining what you’re looking for. In addition, you may have to take it in very large quantities, or with a bunch of other stuff that you didn’t necessarily want.
As time goes on, I’ll list some liquidators, too. Liquidators are great if you keep an eBay store or small business that you can change frequently. If your goal is to run a large scale website or catalog, however, you may find their supply too unpredictable.
Topics: Tricks of the Trade |