Normally I only sell Private Label products on Amazon. But I recently started getting intop Wholesale. 

This is the model where you buy existing products in bulk & sell them on Amazon.

In this post I want to show you

• What methods did I try.
• If I am currently making any money with Wholesale?
• My mistakes & how you can avoid them
• Wholesale tricks & tips

Why Wholesale?

Ok so first why did I start getting into Amazon Wholesale.The reason for that I pretty simple: There is just money to be made here. I am stil doing Private label, launching new products. But I noticed there is also money to be made with the Wholesale model, so I just wanted to try it out.

I also figured it would be fun to learn something new. I have been selling my own brand on Amazon for over 6 years now. But never really got into WS. And just learning this whole new way of selling on amazon was actually quite nice for me. I learned a lot.

Difference Amazon Private Label vs Wholesale

One the things I learned was that there are some huge difference in Private Label versus the Wholesale model.

• Wholesale has lower lead time.
• You sell on already existings listings with wholesale.
• Wholesale requires a lower starting budget.
• It’s way harder to find wholesale products.

Lower Lead time

For example, the lead time was is way shorter for WS.The lead time is how long it take after I place my order until the goods are in stock at Amazon. Since with WS, we are dealing with US companies who already have the goods in stock. So after I placed my order it would only take about a week until the goods were at Amazon, ready to be be sold. Now this is a huge difference with my private label products. Where it takes about 3 months of my goods being produced & shipped, going through customers and all that stuff.

Sell on already existing listings

One of the hardest parts of selling your private label products is getting visitors to your listing & converting them into sales. This requires a lot of PPC, reviews, high quality images, sales text, keyword research, etc.

Now the great thing about wholesale is that you won’t have to do any of this! You will be selling products that are already selling well on Amazon.

Lower Starting budget

When I started with WS I figured all these suppliers who have very high minimum orders. But this really isn’t all that bad, most time its only a couple hundred dollars.

And of course this is a very small amount compared to my private label products, where I am already paying more than $2k for shipping a container from China to the US.

Harder to Find Products

Now these are all great things about the WS model. However, for me the hardest part  was finding the right products.

It’s not like Private Label where you can just use a tool like Jungle Scout, and setup some filter to show you all the high demand / low competition products.

Instead, it’s a lot of manual work. Finding suppliers, e-mailing back & forward, checking their product lists.

Products I Avoided

• Products that require ungating. 
• Product where amazon is the seller.
• Product that have +10 sellers..

Now I think you can do this in 2 ways. You can either buy from distributors or directly from the brands. I had way more success buying from brands, but il get into that later.

Buying from Distributors

I started with by buying from distributors. Now this is pretty straight forward: You open an account with loads of distributors. You download their product price list and check if you can sell any of their products on Amazon with a profit.

The first mistake I made was that I did all of this manually in the beginning. Which took a lot of time. I felt like a complete noob when I found out you can just automate this.

You can upload these product lists to one of these tools that will run the list through Amazon. And it will show you directly how much profit you can make. But also the Best Seller Rank.

Now this is all pretty easy and that is exactly the problem. Because it is so easy & a lot of people can do this you will see that there are a lot of sellers for these products. And therefor the profit margins a lot lower. Now this doesn;t mean you can’t make any money this way. I am currently selling a couple products that I found throught those list. It’s just that the margins are not that amazing.

Buying fom Brands

I have had way more success buying directly from brands.I currently am selling a product that I am buying directly from a brand & it’s making me a couple hundred each month. Not too much but I guess I barely have to do any work for this so it’s pretty to upscale this.

And when I say brands I don’t mean big brands like Nike or Lego. I am talking about some very small, niche brands that might only have like 10 products. 

So how do you find these products & brands. Wel lI did this by simply checking every product I came across. So for example, I am really into climbing. So for every climbing harness or training tool I would use. I would check if it’s being sold on Amazon, how many sellers are there, how much revenue are they making. And if things are looking promising I would try to buy directly from the brand in bulk.

Now here is the next problem I ran into:

Loads of these smaller brands dont want to sell to Amazon sellers. They might already sell there themselves or have a deal with some other seller that they can be the exclusive Amazon seller. 

Now you can either be upfront about this and just tell them right away you will sell their product on Amazon and receive a Yes/No answer. In my experience, mostly a no.

Or you don’t tell them you will sell on Amazon. And pretend you have a brick & mortar shop export their product. Whatever reason you can think of that you will not compete with them on Amazon. I have more success with the latter method,

But I just had more succes when I didnt straight away say I was an Amazon Seller.

Either way you will have the most success if your presentation is on point. So create a 

• Make a good looking website website
• Setup an professional e-mail. Don’t e-mail these companies from your personal gmail account. If you register your website domain you can setup any e-mail you like. So what I did was setup the e-mail: purchasing-dept@companyname.com. Ths gives a way more professional vibe and they are way more likely to do business with you.
• Make sure to get some Google reviews
• Some brands also require a resale certificate, so get that as well