Lesson 2 of 7

Get Prepared For Wholesale

The paperwork and the presentation a supplier expects before they will open an account with you.

Before contacting a single supplier, there are things that need to exist. Suppliers check, and an application from a business with no online presence and no paperwork is usually ignored. This lesson covers what to put in place first.

1. A website

The most important item, and the one most sellers skip. Many wholesalers and distributors expect you to have either a physical shop or an online store, and the website is what answers that question before it is asked.

There are three levels, and any of them beats nothing:

A one-page business site. Who you are, what you do, and how to contact you. This is the minimum, and it takes an afternoon.
An e-commerce store. Considerably more persuasive. Shopify or WooCommerce, with even a handful of products on it, changes how a supplier reads your application.
A services site. The most effective, and the subject of the rest of this lesson.

A practical shortcut for the e-commerce store: list the same products you sell on Amazon, priced higher. You are not trying to build a second sales channel; you are demonstrating that an online store exists. Priced above your Amazon offers, it will rarely sell, so you are not committing yourself to fulfilling orders from it.

2. Something to offer, not just something to ask for

This is the idea that separates a good approach from one that gets ignored, and it applies with real force to brands.

An email that says "please open a trade account so I can buy your products" asks the supplier for something and offers nothing. Every seller sends that email. A brand owner reading it sees one more Amazon reseller.

The alternative is to offer services. The lesson points at several large Amazon sellers as models, of which Netrush and Avalanche Industries are the two still trading under those names at the time of writing. Look at their sites and notice what they lead with. Neither presents itself as a reseller. Each presents a set of services for brands: content optimisation, Amazon SEO, retail strategy, buying without returns.

They are competing for the same shelf space you are. They have framed the request as an offer.

What services can you actually offer

Whatever you genuinely know how to do. The example given is a background in SEO and video production, which became an offer of SEO services, video marketing and listing optimisation.

Realistic options for most sellers:

Listing optimisation. Most brand listings on Amazon are weak. You can see this yourself, and improving one is real work with a visible result.
Advertising. Running pay-per-click campaigns for the brand's products.
Price monitoring. Watching for sellers undercutting the brand's recommended price, which brands care about intensely and mostly cannot track.
Marketing reach, if you have an audience anywhere.

Only offer what you can deliver. A brand that takes you up on it will expect the work done, and a promise you cannot keep costs you the account and the reputation.

Whatever you choose, put it on the website. The point of writing it down is that you can link to it in the first email instead of explaining it.

3. The paperwork

United States: a resale certificate. Effectively required. It lets you buy without paying sales tax on goods you will resell, and suppliers ask for it as standard.
United Kingdom and the EU: a VAT number. Not compulsory, and it helps. Larger wholesalers and brands use it as a rough signal that you are an established business rather than someone testing an idea.
A company registration number, if you have incorporated.

None of these makes you look bigger than you are. What they do is remove easy reasons to decline.

The order to do this in

Get the tax registration your country expects.
Put up a business site, even a single page.
Decide what services you can honestly offer, and write them on it.
Add a simple store if you can manage it.

Then start contacting suppliers. Doing it the other way round means burning your first approaches, which are the ones to the suppliers you most want.