High expectations for wholesaling

Greetings all,

I am a new member, so I am not sure what to expect from my suppliers in terms of quality service.

Ok , so I read the 'myth's' section of the board, and learned that Wholesale is only 10-15% below what retail is....bummed....Was thinking I would have agreater profit margin.

I am having problems with the qaulity of feeds I am getting. Initially I signed up what a 'large' service and was just not happy with the feed, the prices, and custormer service. I am on my second distributor now, and their feed is of poor qaulity as well. I buld upload (300-2500 products at a time) to my auctions and my store so I can't sit and edit every product description.

By poor quality I mean
*No description, just a model or SKU number
*Weak or single line descriptions
*Misspelling, our punctination errors
*Descriptons in ALL CAPS
*Poor or low resolution photos

Is there a general standard to expect from a distributor concerning the quality of their feed?

Where can I get a good 'qaulity feed' ....if they exist? (Amazon has great looking descriptions!)

Hi psnw,

Welcome to SaleHoo :)

Don't let this discourage you. There are other things you have to factor into the equation. For one, the volume of your orders will play a big role. Remember, the more volume you order from a supplier the higher your profit margin can get. Most suppliers are generally willing to offer additional discounts for volume purchases. Although, this is something you should not expect if you are using wholesale drop shipping.

From what I know there is really no written standard on the quality of feeds you can expect from a supplier. You can expect anything and everything even if you are paying a great price for such services.

Although the idea of listing products straight from the drop shipper’s site to your auctions/store sounds appealing, we do not recommend it. The reason being that you have absolutely no way of distinguishing yourself from the hundreds of other sellers using the same tool to sell the same products!

If your titles are the same, your pictures are the same, your description is the same, the shipping and service is the same – what is your competitive advantage? Where is your unique selling point? You might get a couple of sales if you are lucky, but it’s not a workable model for building an ongoing profitable venture.

I understand that your upload hundreds of products at a time, but what's the use of uploading so many products when you don't even have one that's decent enough to convince buyers to buy from you.
It will be time consuming to re-word some of the descriptions, but I'm pretty sure it will be worth your while. Especially once sales start pouring in :)

Hope this helps...Cheers! :)

Richelle touches on some very important points regarding the feeds you are listing. You could waste your time doing 20,000, but if they are the same as everyone else then you have no competitive advantage, other than if you cut your price to the bone.

The other problem you are going to have is your margin, because if you were disappointed with what real wholesale prices are like, they are wholesale margins, not drop shipping margins.

Despite the fact that most drop shippers will call themselves 'wholesale Drop Shippers', the word 'wholesale' is only used as a marketing term and does not reflect true wholesale price because they already have their margin built into it.

Companies buy in container loads at a time, you simply can not expect to receive the same wholesale price on a product as a Walmart does when you are only buying one, in fact in reality with drop shipping you are not actually buying anything.

Let me say that I like your idea of volume listings. This has always appealed to me.

Doba has a feed system where you can add code to the feed. You could thereby have a personalized bulk listing. Unfortunately, I was not impressed with their prices. But I guess if someone were to list enough items they might come out ahead.

Couldn't you feed items to eBay and then edit your listings and lay code in under the original feed. I think you can do this at 25 listings at a time, if Im not mistaken.

Maybe a quick call to eBay tech support might give you some options.