Online Search, Trade Shows and Forums

This lesson works through three of the five routes in practice: finding trade shows and mining their exhibitor lists, using directories and forums, and the search patterns that find suppliers your competitors have not already found. It also covers the spreadsheet that holds the whole process together.

Trade shows, without attending

Search for your category plus "trade show": toys trade show, grocery trade show, health and beauty trade show. Open the show's website.

Then go to the exhibitor list, usually under an Exhibit or Visitor section. That is a published directory of suppliers in your category, with contact details, free to anyone.

It is better than a general search for one reason: every company on it has paid money to sell wholesale. They have taken a stand specifically to find buyers. That is a much stronger signal than a website that happens to mention wholesale.

If you can attend, do. Approval rates in person are better, because a conversation at a stand skips most of the filtering an emailed application goes through. Contact exhibitors beforehand so you can approach the stand as a continuation rather than a cold introduction, and follow up with the ones you missed afterwards.

Directories and forums

Paid wholesale directories give you some free entries and charge for the full database. Deal sites list products with the wholesale price and the Amazon price side by side.

The honest assessment given here is worth repeating: the products on those sites are mostly not worth buying. The experience described is of consistently poor sales ranks and no usable deals. That should not be surprising. A deal published to every subscriber of a paid service stops being a deal.

But there is a technique that makes them useful anyway:

1. Find a product on the deal site.
2. Look at who is supplying it.
3. Ignore the deal. Find that wholesaler's own website.
4. Approach them directly and open your own account.

You are using the site as a directory of suppliers rather than as a shop. Several good suppliers were found this way. Their full catalogue, at your own negotiated prices, is worth far more than the handful of lines they publish to a deal site.

Forums such as thewholesaleforums.co.uk and wholesaleforum.com work similarly. Nobody names their own supplier, for obvious reasons, but you pick up names, categories and approaches. Look past the first page of results for smaller, less-used forums.

Search patterns

Four that work, from most specific to least:

• Exact product name in quotation marks, plus wholesaler. Quotation marks force an exact match, which matters when a product name contains common words.
• Product name plus distributor. Different companies describe themselves differently, and this returns a different set.
• Brand name plus wholesaler. If you know a brand sells, find who distributes it.
• Category plus wholesaler. Broadest, and most competitive.

Go past the first page

This is the most valuable advice in the lesson. Any wholesaler on the first page of results is already used by your competitors. Everyone runs the same searches and stops at the top.

Pages two, three and four hold smaller wholesalers with worse search rankings and, frequently, better prices and less competition on the products they carry. The extra effort is the entire advantage, because it is effort almost nobody makes.

Judging a wholesaler's website

The first thing to look at is the range, and there is a genuine trade-off:

• A narrow range means few chances of finding profitable lines. Usually not worth the effort of opening an account.
• A wide range gives you more to work with, which is what you want.
• A very well-known wholesaler has higher prices, because every seller already buys from them and the profitable lines are worked out. Wide range, few deals.

So the target is a wholesaler with a broad catalogue that is not already famous. That is the same reasoning as going past the first page.

Then find the contact details and put them in your spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet

You will be tracking dozens of conversations at different stages over months. Without a record you will forget who you contacted, when, and what they said. Columns worth having:

• Company name and website
• Email and telephone
• The next action you need to take
• The date you last made contact
• The date of the next action
• A status colour

Two habits make it work. Colour code the status, so the rows needing attention are visible without reading. And put the next-action dates in your calendar, because most of this process is following up, and a follow-up that depends on remembering will not happen.

Build the list first, then set aside dedicated days to work through it, rather than contacting suppliers one at a time as you find them.

It is a numbers exercise

Most suppliers will not reply. Some will decline. That is the normal shape of this work and it is not a signal that you are doing it wrong.

What determines the outcome is how many you approach, which is why the spreadsheet and the dedicated contact days matter more than the wording of any single email.

• Wholesalers List
• Brands List
• Product Ideals List
• Competitors List