Hot niche idea: Wholesale gifts

What are wholesale gifts?

These are the little things that work well as gifts for any occasion, and may include decorative accents, personal accessories, novelty items, trinkets, and collectibles. You can purchase these wholesale, and sell them successfully from your online store.

The appeal of wholesale gifts

One of the advantages of selling wholesale gifts is their great appeal to buyers, who are always on the lookout for such items to give away on special occasions. And there’s always a special occasion happening somewhere each day.

For sellers, another advantage is the limitless variety of wholesale gifts. Virtually anything can be classified as gifts and you can build a unique stock inventory that is appropriate to your market research and customer profile. You can build around any particular theme. For example, you can build an inventory of bath and body products, or art sculptures, or music boxes, or anything else you can think of. You can also sell items according to the season: Valentine, graduation, summer, Halloween, and others.

Where to source wholesale gifts

Trade shows are a great source of ideas for your wholesale gifts business. The term “gift” actually encompasses a very wide range of merchandise, and you will find literally everything in these shows, including clothing, jewelry, pet care products, specialty food – everything! More importantly, these trade shows are incredibly helpful in finding out what the hot items are for the year, and you should be able to find a supplier or two, or maybe even drop shippers, for the items you fancy. At the very least, you’ll have light bulbs going off inside your head and be motivated to search for new sources, guided by the insights and inspirations you get from these shows. You’ll find a list of scheduled gift shows for 2009 and links to the specific websites at greatrep.com.

You can also use eBay Pulse to find out what the hot-selling items are. When you’ve done your market research, and have decided on a specific niche to sell to, and what categories of products to carry, you can then look for specific suppliers of these items online. For example, among the “Most Watched” items now on eBay Pulse are custom engraved pet tags. Some of the wholesale sources of these hot items include Dog Tags Direct and Never Lost Pet. Or, being a light-weight, no-brand item, this is a fantastic product to import from China.

Also check out Gift Basket Drop Shipping, a wholesale gift baskets dropshipper with over 15 years of experience in the business.