The successful attempt to launch an e-commerce business is to do product sourcing. Being the owner of a product sourcing company, you can make the virtual shelves famous, drive sales, and increase your profit margin by carrying out proper research. In this context you will learn ways to proceed with your product sourcing process.
Product Sourcing Process
It is quite an enticing process to give your ideas a shape and mold them ahead in order to know the category of products you are interested to sell online. And, even if you have decided the category, there are various other details that significantly influence your buying decisions. There are factors, such as demand of your target customers, vendor turnaround, operational efficiencies, the minimum quantity of products required for manufacturing, and ultimately, comes the transportation costs that have direct connection with the profit you make as a seller. These are some of the factors that have direct impact when you sell your product and expect for an overall success.
The product sourcing process comes with a number of convolutions and you need to get through them if you want to make profit and thrive in the competitive market. And, when you will understand the intricacies that is when you will achieve success from your set up before you decide to place your initial wholesale order.
Research What Your Consumer Wants
According to a majority of experts who excel in the marketing field, it is better and far more convenient for the product sourcing companies to sell a product that is already existing in the market and that is popular among the customers than selling a service that is new to the market. It is quite difficult to educate the customers about the new service and also time consuming.
If you focus on this logic and search for products that customers are already interested in purchasing before choosing what to sell, can be a far easier process and free as well. The easiest way to search for products that customers are searching online is knowing what shoppers are seeking in Amazon and looking for the online search results. These two procedures are incredibly helpful and completely free of cost.
Online Search
Keyword research tools are everywhere in the market. Through these tools, you can get to know the top search results on the Internet. You can carry out these searches on either monthly basis or daily basis. There are free tools as well as paid tools and you can use them according to your convenience and budget. Keyword research tools display the monthly search volume in Google for the terms you enter or products you want to search.
Using Amazon
Amazon is no less than a goldmine for carrying out the research for most appropriate data r product ruling the market at any point of time. It gives you the most accurate result based on your search item and the information you provide. Most importantly, you need not have a seller account in Amazon to drill your information. There are seller list pages where you can get all that you want.
From the above two process, you will gain insight into the list of things people are actively searching for the items every month. The overall demand of product can be identified by the product sourcing companies from the search volume and you can also get an idea of the popular products that could bring you the best possible income.
Understand Income Potential And Sales
When you search for products online and using Amazon, you get to know the sales potential of the services. You can easily consider a product as a hot-selling item if you find it in Amazon’s best-selling list and the trending products list.
From the research you do online, you get an idea of the prices you can opt for from buying the products. You can search for the exact products online at wholesale prices in order to make profits. Equally it is vital to understand that your profitability gets affected by the cost of shipping and storing the products.
Here, you can apply an efficient rule of thumb- go for lightweight products instead of purchasing heavy products in bulk. Heavy products will cost you more money and will require ample storage space. On the other hand, lightweight products require comparatively less storage space and the transportation cost will also be less. While you explore a variety of products, try to keep the shipping cost and storage potential in mind.
Be Mindful Of Your Budget
After you have decided on the product you want to sell online, you will require to move to the next step- compare the prices with your competitors. You can make a rough estimation of the product’s cost from what your competitors are selling at and set a budget accordingly.
After the budget is finalized, you can get in touch with a potential wholesaler. A good way to estimate the price you want to offer is reducing the product’s list price to half. You can stretch the budget by searching for services from the suppliers that pay you on resilient terms.
Review And Request For Samples
So, you are determined to sell your products online. In that case, if you consider using wholesale vendors for sourcing the services, you can request for sample of the products before signing a final contract. This will help you learn about the quality of workmanship provided by the respective manufacturing company and allow you to review the products closely. This is a good way to understand the customer service potential of the vendors. Most likely, if the vendors are capable of packing the items and delivering them to you on timely manner, they are reliable.
Negotiate The Payment Terms
In most cases, the standard payment terms and order minimum is already set by the vendors or suppliers, or contract manufacturers. However, you can always request for negotiated terms. A majority of suppliers offer attractive deals for product sourcing companies during certain points of a year. However, it never hurts to ask for similar discounts during other parts of the year as well.