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?
• Is I 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 six years now, but I never really got into WS. Learning this whole new way of selling on Amazon was actually quite nice for me. I learned a lot.

Difference between Amazon Private Label vs Wholesale

One of the things I learned was that there is some huge differences between the Private Labels versus the Wholesale model.

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

Lower Lead time

For example, the lead time for WS was way shorter. The lead time is how long it takes 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 sold. Now, this is a huge difference with my private label products where it takes about three months for my goods to be 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 upgating. 
• 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 by buying from distributors. Now, this is pretty straightforward: You open an account with a lot of distributors, 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 initially, 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 from Brands

I have had way more success buying directly from brands. I currently sell a product that I buy directly from a brand, and it’s making me a couple hundred dollars each month. It’s 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 and brands? Well, I did this by simply checking every product I came across. 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, and how much revenue they are 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-and-mortar shop exporting their product. Whatever reason you think of, you will not compete with them on Amazon. I have more success with the latter method,

But I just had more success when I didn’t straight away say I was an Amazon Seller.

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

• Make a good-looking website website.
• Set up a professional email. Don’t email these companies from your personal Gmail account. If you register your website domain, you can set up any email you like. So what I did was set up the email [email protected]. This gives a much more professional vibe, and they are much 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