When you have your own product or can manufacture your own product, you are the sole seller of the product, and you can set the price for the specific product. You can even build your brand (based on your main product) for the long term success of your business. But many merchandizers and/or online business owners do not have such advantage.

The next best option is to sell/resell products that you can purchase from other manufacturers, suppliers, or distributors. One approach is that you may buy the product in bulk and stock them in your warehouse (which would always incur a storage cost). A second common approach is to do dropshipping where you only purchase the product (from tour supplier) when your customer actually have made an order of the product and have paid for the product. You will leave the fulfillment step (i.e. shipping) of the product to your supplier.

When finding a supplier for your product, the first method is to directly contact the supplier. This works well when you are looking to sell a commoditized product or brand, which is an item that already available out there. You should get hold of the supplier through a voip call or instant messaging. Ask the supplier if you can buy directly from him. The supplier may reply with a yes or no. If his answer is no, you can go to the next best supplier in your list. Do this until you have found a supplier who is willing to sell. Use this supplier for a few times to figure out how reliable he is.

You can make use of tools and/or analytics (or what it is known as a spying tool) that provide you with the best-selling product data, such as the Nichescraper Shopify product spy tool. The tool actually products product selling data that have come from other Shopify ecommerce stores.

The next option is that you can purchase the product from the potential competitor. Go to Amazon, and look up the product with a keyword search, or through the categories and sub categories. Make use of the product rating that is provided by Amazon. You may source your product directly from Alibaba’s website Aliexpress, and find one or two suppliers or manufacturers who you can buy the product from them for a long time. But if your business is to keep changing the main product according to the best-selling product data/list, then it means you will have to frequently look for new suppliers who are able to sell you the new product.

Join Facebook groups or forums where people would talk about what they buy and sell, and where people do dropshipping.

Another way is a common way. Simply run a Google search with some of your product as keywords. If simply using the product as keywords doesn’t return with satisfactory results, then you can add words like “distributor” or “wholesale” to your keywords. With this way, you may have to go through at least a few pages of Google organic results, and sometimes even click on some ads that you believe they are relevant.

Renee Sanders