Retail Blog

It’s hard to avoid the chatter in today’s news about Miley Cyrus. Regardless of your opinion on the photos, it’s hard to deny the appeal of the Hannah Montana brand. Getting your hands on wholesale officially licensed products can be difficult. Here are some ideas.

Check out License-2-Play they have a good selection of wholesale Hannah Montana products. Janson Media, and Alliance Entertainment are wholesale sources for Hannah Montana DVDs.

For other related suppliers check out GiftSuppliers.us.

 

Is a slowing economy affecting the types of products that retailers plan on stocking their shelves with? What other products are your competitors planning on selling this summer? Data from ProductBlazer, the web’s largest wholesale supplier search engine can help provide some insight.

Will a newly thrifty consumer turn to handicrafts, sewing kits, and thimbles to reduce their monthly budgets? Will they keep spending on kids dress up parties? Wedding season approaches quickly, and flower girls will need to be outfitted regardless of the state of the economy. And what exactly is unique cheap? ProductBlazer answers all!

The following table shows quickly accelerating searches on ProductBlazer.

 

Thousands of independent retailers and wholesale suppliers and manufacturers use ProductBlazer to find new products to sell. So, what’s hot this week? Much like Google tracks interesting trends in their search results, we do the same. (Though we don’t have pretty charts yet.)Here’s a compilation of some accelerating search keywords over the last thirty days. You can click on each keyword to view the search results at ProductBlazer.

 

We don’t always recommend drop-shipping to our community. In fact, we recently provided compelling reasons why selling drop-ship products from a single supplier on EBay was a poor retailing strategy. However, don’t throw the drop-ship baby out with the low margin bath water. A well managed drop-ship strategy can do wonders for your business by increasing your product selection without increasing your inventory investment. You can develop a great drop-ship program by following our tips for drop-ship success.

Remember the RetailBlazer formula for success? Here’s a refresher:

Success = Community + Expertise + Relationships + Branding

It should not come as a surprise to learn that relationships are the most important aspect of a good drop-ship program. The first step in selling drop-shipped products is finding a supplier. There is no shortage of companies that claim to be drop-shippers. Unfortunately, most of these companies are glorified retailers. You won’t get good pricing, you won’t get good service, you won’t get good products. Finding suppliers is hard, right? Not anymore! ProductBlazer puts over 27,000 wholesale suppliers and manufacturers at your fingertips. Here’s a list of twenty drop-ship suppliers to get you started.

1. Understand how drop-shipping is different.

This may seem obvious. The main difference is that you, as retailer, don’t have the product you are selling in inventory–the supplier does. But from your customer’s perspective there should be no, or very little, difference. If your customer contacts you with a question about the product you will need to be able to answer the question without having the physical product on hand. “I’ll call my supplier” isn’t a good answer for customer inquiries!

2. Accept that drop-ship does not equal unlimited supply.

This is one of the biggest “gotchas!” for retailers selling drop-ship products. Just because you are not managing inventory does not mean that no one has to manage inventory. The supplier you are buying from is selling the same products to other retailers. Talk to your account manager and understand the supplier’s backorder policy. Make sure that if your primary supplier is out of stock you will have the ability to shop the order to other suppliers, rather than passing the backorder back to your customer.

3. Start with a single product line.

Walk before you run. Select a single line of products, or even a single SKU, and begin your drop-ship career by selling only those products. It is practically guaranteed that you will encounter hiccups that you had not anticipated–better to start slow, learn the ropes, and then expand your drop-shipping. In a year you may never have to manage inventory again!

4. Establish strong relationships with suppliers.

This is a running theme for the team at ProductBlazer. As a retailer you are only as good as your supplier relationships. It is worth spending the time to get on the phone and introduce yourself to your suppliers. Let the account manager know what you want to sell, your expected volume, and what you are doing to build your business. B2B relationships are a two-way street. All suppliers will check your credit before they start accepting your orders–accept that, and be ready for it.

5. Understand how the supplier communicates price and quantity information.

The best way to avoid backorders is to only sell products that you can actually supply to the customer. It sounds simple, but digesting stock quantity information from your suppliers can be a chore if you don’t have the right information systems in place. All high-volume suppliers will provide you with an electronic file that provides a snapshot of their inventory positions. Some will provide information daily, others hourly, and only rarely in real-time. It may be worth the effort to have a consultant create a small application to import the supplier’s stock quantity information into your own inventory management application.

6. Examine your return policy.

Make sure that your return policy is compatible with the supplier’s return policy. You may find that some suppliers will not accept returns for products they sell through drop-shipping. You need to fully understand the supplier’s reseller agreement before you start sending them orders.

7. Check for pricing changes every day.

Unless you were able to negotiate a custom reseller agreement you need to check for pricing changes every day. The supplier will probably communicate these changes to you along with stock quantity information for all of the products the supplier sells–not just the products that you sell. If there are positive or negative price adjustments you need to know as soon as possible, as you may need to adjust your own retail price for the product.

Drop-shipping isn’t rocket science, but it takes effort to get right. The most important thing is to establish strong supplier relationships. Get started today by using ProductBlazer to find new wholesale suppliers!

 

The prognosticators say that Main Street retailing is dead. The big box stores have ruthlessly driven Mom and Pop out of business to the ultimate detriment of consumers everywhere. The prognosticators are wrong. To see why, take a look at something going on in between retail and wholesale. First, let’s look at their tails. Their long tails, to be exact.

The ‘long tail’ is a statistical concept recently popularized by Chris Anderson in articles and his book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”. Being the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, and having skills that include rigorous mathematical chops, Anderson demonstrates a recurring phenomenon in markets across many industries. Namely, he shows that very often in demand curves one sees that the majority of sales are accounted for by small, niche products or companies. Large sales volumes are predominated by large numbers of small sales added up.

For a particular company, the long tail consists of products that sell individually in low volumes. Amazon is the poster child of long tail business planning. Josh Peterson, now a former Amazon employee, summed it up this way: “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.” That is, Amazon makes most of its money selling books every day that no one has ever heard of, and that hardly anyone reads.

For a given industry, the long tail is comprised of companies that individually have low sales numbers. In the $3.5 trillion retail industry it is Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot who get all the attention. Indeed, those three themselves account for $500 billion in sales. However, the top 100 retailers have combined sales of just $1.5 trillion. And the top 1,000 retailers have under $1.6 trillion. Most of the rest - almost $2 trillion in sales - goes to everyone else. This is a classic long tail, and it is overwhelming comprised of small, independent businesses. Mom and Pop aren’t doing so badly.

Whether a long tail exists in a company depends mainly upon inventory and distribution costs. Where those are high, sellers will tend to focus on stocking items that have high sales volumes, ignoring the slow movers. Where inventory costs are low, distribution and access to markets become key. Even if it had them all in stock, Amazon couldn’t sell the long tail of books if it couldn’t reach the massive market of low-volume niche buyers interested in them. Of course, the internet is the driving technology that makes that market efficiency possible.

Whether a long tail exists in an industry depends mainly on market efficiency and barriers to entry. For instance, there is no long tail in the cable industry. It’s simply too hard to start your own cable company. It’s also a relative hassle for consumers to make switches, assuming they have a choice. Retail has a long tail because practically anyone can open up a shop, and consumers can shop anywhere they like. Wholesale goods is another industry with a long tail. With some 100,000 wholesale suppliers, most of the $2.3 trillion sold at wholesale goes to the bottom 99,900 businesses.

Wholesale suppliers sell to retailers. To what degree do their two long tails intersect? Again, it depends on market efficiency. Large retailers find it ridiculously easy to find suppliers, who line up at their doors hoping for a chance to sell. Small retailers don’t have it so easy. For decades their main way of finding suppliers was through aggregation services like rep firms and trade shows. These are expensive and/or time-consuming, and ultimately meant they did business with a relatively small number of large vendors. It was only the larger guys who could afford to have many small vendors. The two long tails didn’t meet.

In much the same way the internet enabled the long tail phenomenon of Amazon, it is also enabling the intersection of the long tails of retail and wholesale. With vertical search engines like ProductBlazer, small retailers have access to tens of thousands of small suppliers and their products. With credit card transactions and email communication, the cost for small retailers of doing business with a larger number of small suppliers has fallen.

This is nothing short of a mini-revolution. Consumers can now go to a big box store to buy all the things that everyone else buys, at competitive prices. They can also go to their favorite small retailer and get something that no one else buys, at great margins for the retailer.

Mom and Pop will never again sell Ivory soap as cheaply as Target, but then again, they should be smart enough now not to try. Instead, they are thriving by having a detailed, intimate knowledge of their customers and the ability to find and deliver unique, niche products to them that Target would never touch. This is Mom and Pop’s own niche, and their access to the long tail of wholesale suppliers ensures they’ll occupy it for years to come.