Selling branded items

Not all of you may be aware that selling trademarked or branded products need you to have a license before you can re-sell them. Talk about Apple, Samsung, Nike, Adidas, Fitbit , and other big brands in the market – they are all under licensing agreement that protects their brand value by limiting their distribution channels.

To become an authorized distributor, you need to contact the manufacturer themselves and fill-out an application form to do this. Usually, they require a large minimum purchase (about $100,000 or even more), while others may prohibit you from selling brands made by competitors. Depending on their license agreements, you need to be able to fulfill their requirements for you to become an authorized retailer.

If you’re just starting out, there’s another legal way to re-sell branded goods and that’s through sourcing from liquidators.

Liquidators are suppliers that sell their products at very low prices in order to move stocks. Popular liquidation sales happen during end of season, or if a company is moving out, or have gone bankrupt. Sourcing from liquidators gives you the chance to purchase non-moving stocks, even branded goods, at really low rates. The only thing about sourcing through liquidators is that finding a specific brand/model may be a challenge since you are usually picking out items from overstocks. That said, finding a branded item to re-sell is legal through liquidators and you can still re-sell them at a profit.

Hi Rhea, thanks for this! Do you know if this applies to officially licensed sports memorabilia - memorabilia that isnt made by any of the manufacturers you listed above? I am specifically talking to Big Apple Card Company that is listed on the Salehoo list of wholesale vendors. I am wondering if I would be able to sell their merchandise on ebay without becoming an authorized distributor. Any comment on that would be great. Thanks!

Hi Hody and welcome to the forum,

Let me just calrify Rhea's post for you. There are essentially two avenues for licensed products to be sourced from: closed or open networks. A closed network is where the license owner will usually keep complete control of their brand by only selling it through their own authorised network. So the only avenue you have to sourcing these products wholesale is to join that network, however as Rhea has highlighted, you need to be seriously cashed up and be able to prove a solid sales stream in most cases.

Now in an open network, the brand owner will usually authorise a distributor/s to wholesale their product to general retailers. So in this situation, the product will be made available in MOQ amounts by the distributor/s. This type of distribution means the licensed brand will have far less protections, but will be open to far more sellers, giving the license holder the opportunity for greater market coverage, without doing all the work themselves by setting up their own closed distribution network.

Big Apple is an authorised distrbutor and has been fully verified by SaleHoo, so you are able to legally purchase through them. If you want extra peace of mind or are ever in any doubt at all with a supplier in the future, always ask them for a copy of their license authorisation that gives them permission from the brand owner to distribute their product.

Cheers

Hi

Thank you for that have you any links to this info please.

What links would you like?

Thanks Mark and Rhea, this is super interesting.

Has your team (or anyone else) put together a list of top liquidators? For instance, liquidators selling refurbished apple products?

Thanks,

Malcolm

Hi Malcom,

You can find all of our verified suppliers listed in the directory, just select "liquidators" for supplier type in the search criteria. We can't develop actual lists of what surplus suppliers sell and most of them have constantly changing stock, due to the nature of that market. So you're only option is to keep an eye on them, maybe join their mailing lists to keep on top of evolving stock as it becomes available.

Cheers

Thanks for this very informative post, Rhea. This would be helpful for those interested to sell branded items and is especially helpful given that SaleHoo has already verified the Liquidators listed in the site as we have to deal with avoiding risk for fraud. Potentially, some scammers can post items as branded and authentic when in fact, the items are counterfeit.

Thanks again for this post. :)