Global Wholesale Distribution and Price Market Research

One possible business you can start on the Web is global wholesale
distribution. This requires choosing an industry to target (e.g. brand
named consumer electronics), obtaining a list of verified suppliers from
a reputable source, and selling the items you’ve purchased in your own
market for a profit. The global wholesale distribution business entails
moving merchandise from foreign suppliers and manufacturers to your
customers. You can choose to sell your items directly to consumers to
merely act as a distributor to existing retailers.


Price is one of the key factors in choosing the right global
suppliers for this business. Here are some tips on how to research
prices for your global wholesale product sourcing business:

Comparing Supplier Prices with Current Market Prices

The seemingly overwhelming task can be easily made simple by breaking
up the enormous mass of information and your ultimate goal into
smaller, easier-to-tackle modules.


Assuming that each of your suppliers is reputable and honest, your
first task will then be the compare the prices of your suppliers to find
how they rate against the current market value. The goal here is to
find the products that will generate an acceptable level of profit to
add to your portfolio of products for sale.


Regardless of the method of e-commerce you choose to sell your items
through, building your portfolio of revenue generating items and selling
them at the same time will increase your chances of sale due to the
natural synergy of your portfolio (assuming that all of the items are
different enough from each other to be competitors within their own
markets).

Auction Sites versus Regular E-Commerce Websites

Keep in mind when you’re comparing your supplier prices, or
performing your market research that you distinguish between market
prices obtained through auction sites such as Taobao (Chinese auction
site) or eBay and those gathered from non-auction e-commerce shopping
cart sites. Whilst they may appear to sell the same product (for example
Apple iPod Touch with identical packages) on both sites, prices are
generally lower on auction sites because of the inconsistent warranties
available, product conditions, new/used status, and general
accountability of sellers trading on auction sites as compared to
operators selling from there own purchased domain named website with
site related guarantees. It is not to say that you cannot make a decent
profit from auction sites and not grab an absolute bargain from
non-auction e-commerce shopping cart sites. The point is to distinguish
between the two markets because there are some marked differences in the
behavior of both buyers and sellers of each.

Tracking Your Research

To keep track of your market research you should make use of
available software specific to the monitoring of prices and market
trends. If this is not readily available you can easily develop a
spreadsheet suitable for your needs. When developing your own
spreadsheet you may find it useful to list your column headings from
left to right in the following order:

• Supplier
• Product
• Price
• Market Price #1
• Market Price #2
• Market Price #3
• Market Price #4
• Market Price #5
• Average Price (avg prices 1-5)
• Average Profit (Average Price – Price)
• Average Return On Investment % (Average Profit / Price)*100

Whilst simple, this spreadsheet will allow you to view all of the
prices at the same time and give you the opportunity to sort the higher
performing items from the lower performing ones. From here you should
set a baseline Return On Investment level and choose to sell only items
achieving equal to or greater than that goal (e.g. only Apple iPod Touch
units achieving an ROI equal to or greater than 15%. A note should be
made that because of the price movements of any given market as well as
the rate at which new products are released and developed – consequently
making current items not-so-current items – your market research is
only valid for a limited amount of time only. This means that once you
have decided on your suitable product no time should be wasted from that
point to the time of sale.

For Your Benefit

It will be extremely beneficial in your early days as an Internet
Wholesale Trader if you can train your mind to think along the lines of
Return on Investment whenever you think of adding new products to your
portfolio. In the end, it doesn’t matter where you want to sell your
products, implementing a process that systematically evaluates the
ability of a product to generate a profit will mean that you can measure
the feasibility of almost ANY product or service out there. This will
ensure possibly limitless product options within the general scope of
your business and your current product knowledge because you will be
thinking more on how beneficial selling that product will be for you
instead of simply how much you’d like the product for yourself, or how
cool it is.


Like many professions, your success in Global Product sourcing and
Wholesale Trade will depend on your ability to put into practice the
good lessons you learned and learn from your mistakes. Whether or not
the information you have just read will help you directly in your
current business practices, it should at the very least, get you
thinking in the right direction towards wholesale sourcing success.