Detailed guide for contacting suppliers

Hi Community,

I a newbie, just joined Salehoo recently. When I find adropshipper or wholesaler, how do I contact them? What steps should I prepare ? What questions or answers etc.? Do they need a fee or deposit up front before I can establish doing business with them ?

Could you give two examples of how you first contact the dropshipper and wholesaler? By phone or just email? I want to avoid making any serious mistakes.

Thank you in advance, for your help.

Hi Cem, and welcome to the site.

It's all pretty straight forward to contact either a Drop Shipper or Wholesaler, and it's quite acceptable to use email as that initial form of contact.

Different Drop Shippers charge different fees, and some do charge an upfront fee for using their service, so beware of that.

Most genuine wholesalers will actually require you to open an account, and require you show your Tax id as proof of your trading entity So if you are going to be buying in wholesale volume then a tax id may well be required.

Apart from that you can just ask them anything you would like to know that they don't disclose on their website, the questions that are most important to you.

You really just want to do a lot of research comparing prices on products from different suppliers to make sure you are getting the best price, and then of course measure that price against where it is you want to sell the products to make sure you can make margin on them.

Good luck with it, and we hope to see more of you on the forum as your journey starts.

Cheers

: )

Hi Cem8358,

Welcome to SaleHoo! It's great to have you here :)

It's the perfect time to start since Christmas is fast approaching. Like what fudjj has said, for your initial contact, email would do. Note though that some suppliers have a backlog of support emails so it may take a few days for them to get back to you. In this case, it would be best to give them a phone call.

Also, note that no true wholesaler should charge you to sell their products but an exception to this are drop shippers. As previously pointed out, drop shippers may charge a small fee for every transaction to cover for packing, handling. There are also some that will charge small account set-up fees. While by no means ideal, this is a fairly common practice among drop shippers.

There are many possible questions to ask a supplier. I suggest that you ask everything that you want to know about them and their services before doing business with them. Some of the questions might have been answered already by viewing the supplier description in our directory or by going to the supplier website's Help section.

I have listed some of the important questions here for you.

1. What are your wholesale distribution policies?
2. What are your returns policies?
3. Do you charge a fee to set up an account?
4. Do you accept PayPal or credit cards?
5. Are the products stocked in your own warehouse?
6. Are you able to provide true wholesale pricing?
7. Do you collect Tax ID information?
8. Do you sell wholesale and retail? Do you sell on eBay?

Additional questions for drop shippers:
1. Are you able to provide a real-time inventory of your products?
2. Do you offer blind drop shipping?

If you click on the 'Education' tab on any SaleHoo Page, you will find some great article with excellent tips on finding suppliers, pre-qualifying suppliers, online selling, etc. Also, don't forget to download the Bonus Guides by clicking on the 'Bonus Guides *New*' link on the left-hand side of any SaleHoo page.

Hope that helps! I wish you all the best!

Cheers,