Let's start with the main thing: How to find products for wholesale? Here are some steps:

1. Find one or two areas where you have basic understanding. Why? Because many products might look very similar, but they are not, and there is nothing worse than selling a product that is very similar (but not) realizing later after customer complains (and Amazon shutting down your listing) that what you sent was not 100% match. Thus said, if you can’t tell a difference between a mineral motor oil and synthetic maybe ‘Automotive Category’ is not your cup of tea.

2. Learn more about that category and industry overall. There are many ways to do it – here is just one of them. Open your Amazon browser (recommend Chrome), go to Amazon and start looking at products and making a list of smaller sellers on listings with average BSRs. Why smaller sellers? How do you know? You want seller with less rankings we would say below a few hundred (with customer satisfaction > 95% - most likely FBAs). Bigger players that have been around the block have more purchasing power, can get better deals and most likely you won’t be able to win the buybox or compete on price. Now, make a list of those brands (while paying attention to the product lines). After reviewing 10-20 sellers, you will be able to see some patterns – common brands, similar products. You can easily review and analyze these sellers with Stripetail Seller Investigator, for example. It will obtain their product lists from their store fronts with all necessary information.

3. Take those brands and start contacting them (either to brand owner or brand itself). Please don’t send emails from PinkSharkTooth1234@gmail 😊. Create your business domain name with email. GoDaddy will do it for a $100-200 bucks per year. Now, you look professional. Then, ask them (a) if you can purchase in bulk from them directly or (b) if there is a distributor you can source their products from. If you don’t hear back from them – call them, email again. From 10-20 brands you will get somewhere with just a few… this is a part of the process. Sometimes you would spend many weeks of following up to get somewhere. Sometimes it will be a waste. The harder it is to ‘get through’ the more promising it might be as many of others would give up.

4. When you get in contact with a brand, now you need to start schmoozing and convincing the brand that they will benefit from allowing you resell them. There will be many that will tell “NO to Amazon” and there will be many who will say that they need Brick and Mortar store (“physical location”). Some of us give up in these cases, and some somehow manage opening or convincing that they/their partners have a brick/mortar store. However, if you don’t have brick and mortar – just move on.

5. If you get a list of distributors or even one distributor from that brand – this is awesome. Now, do some research – look at their requirements, look at what they have. Log that list into excel (or google) spreadsheet and systematically start contacting them and setting up accounts with them (use your professional email and promote yourself to “CEO” or “Director" 😊). Set up accounts then…and don’t forget to show them your State Sales Certificate (so you are exempt from paying sales tax of resold items). Also, there are always different price tiers meaning that depending on your Purchase Order, or monthly commitments, or annual volume, you may get additional discounts.

Note: There are times when you spend a few weeks setting up an account with a vendor, then you schmooze them, then you research all their products just to realize they might not be the first (i.e. main) distributor, and therefore the prices are awful, and you feel down and want to give up. You should not! During this time you perfected your negotiations or learned some red flags. Word of advice: do several distributors at the same time – out of many there will be one that would work.

6. Once account is set up now it is time to do research. There are many methods, and these methods can bring you new products so you should try them all. Mix it up… you need to give yourself a few weeks of research per vendor…

a. Vendors List (UPC to ASIN match). Most of reputable distributors carry 100-500 different brands with 1000 to 50,000 products. Ask for the list for products in a ‘flat file’ (text, csv) or excel. Now, you need to use a tool to match UPCs to Amazon listings that will generate reports with matched products, calculated profitability, margins, shown BSR, and so on (In theory, you can try to do it manually by copying-pasting into Amazon and collect information – but this is not very efficient and becomes frustrating experience).

Once you get these reports – start looking. Most likely, you will get many products with high BSR, or negative profitability – and that’s OK… this is part of the game… 95% (or even more) of products from distributors of different brands have either high BSR or negative profitability… and of whatever remaining most of them are out of stock 😊 … once again, this is part of the game – you don’t need thousands of listings from start. You just need a hand-full of products at first and increase slowly to 100-200-300-1000 listings. However, with more listings you get additional headaches… But even 10 SKUs selling 1 per day over 30 days where you make $2-$3 will make you $600-$1000. It is a numbers game…  You could stay at that level and operate out of you house… but most likely you will keep on digging and growing.

b. Brand focus. Once you get a list from vendors see which brands they seem to carry more products on, and target them. However, even before you get too deep into your analysis – put that brand name into Amazon, and study first 2-3 pages (30-60 listings). If you see only one seller – then it must be a PL (private label) and you should probably stay away, or if you see only Amazon on most of listings – also stay away – most likely that brand has some sort of agreement (even if it does not, you will not win a buybox from Amazon). However, if you see a mix of Amazon, FBA, FBM – this maybe a good sign… Then, you can either go to step (a) above and just run bulk Stripetail UPC investigator match, or bulk brand investigator pull, or pull manually into the spreadsheet and recalculate.

c. Occasionally you can study the brand and look for some ‘weird stuff’. Pictures from your distributors might match to amazon listing but UPC does not. Congrats! You might have found a hidden treasure – either your distributor did not put UPC, or UPC changed overtime and it was never updated on Amazon.

d. There are other techniques that we will share in the future, but since it became a large article we would stop at this point :) Stay tuned for new articles, we'll tell you a lot more!