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All wholesalers are not created equal. To be exact, there are wholesalers and there are wannabes. Unless you manufacture your own products, you are likely to buy from wholesalers. Many businesses call themselves wholesalers, yet they are ready to sell to the public. One of the tell tale signs of a wannabe wholesaler is that they sell directly to the public. You may do a search online for a wholesaler in your industry, but when you visit the site you find they are happy to sell to anyone. Wholesaling to such wannabes doesn't have anything to do with what you knew to mean wholesale; it simply shows their desire to sell a lot to as many people as they can.

A wholesaler with integrity will not sell to the public. Real wholesalers have an application process. They normally require resellers to sign up as a reseller. The application process includes a verification process such as faxing a business permit, or tax ID form to the wholesaler. Deal with real wholesalers, and ignore the wannabes.

Note: Wholesalers should never charge you to become a reseller. Remember, you are their customer. They have no legitimate reason to charge you a setup or initiation fee. If they try to charge you such a fee, walk.

Drop Ship

For several reasons, drop shipping is one of the most popular options for many rookie online entrepreneurs. The primary reason for its popularity is that it doesn't require a huge startup capital because the drop shipper maintains the inventory. You don't have to worry about fulfillment either because the product is shipped directly to your customer.

Note: Blind shipping is a common term in the drop shipping industry. It means that your customer will not know that the product was shipped from the drop shipper instead of your address. When your customer receives the package the sender address will show your address instead of the address of the drop shipper. The only disadvantage of blind shipping is that you will receive the returns.

Drop shippers may be factories, wholesalers, distributors, or importers. The advantage of working with a drop shipper is that they provide you with product images and item descriptions. The more sophisticated companies may offer a product feed that will save you time importing all the product images and descriptions into your e-commerce system.