About Wholesale Products

When searching online for products to buy, you may have run across products offered at wholesale. While buying in bulk may seem like a great strategy, it can come with issues. Whether you're buying, selling, or even marketing these products, you need to know what you're doing – or you will lose money.

Buying

When buying wholesale, you can save a great deal of money, but you may also lose out on money. Wholesale items come in bulk, so instead of buying one of the items, you buy many of them at once. For instance, tea light candles come in bulk often. You could buy a batch of 10 at a normal price of $3, or you could buy them in bulk. A bulk bag could be 250 for $6. You get a significance savings, but if you don't have a need for 250 tea light candles, then you're wasting your money. If you know of an occasion you could use that many, though, it's worth buying them. Another way wholesale helps is that it saves on packaging and shipping.

Selling

When selling wholesale products, you may run into the issue of how you should price them. Taking the tea light candles into consideration, pricing them comes with a few things to consider. First, determine the shipping and handling costs associated with just one package of tea lights. Now, consider the savings if you sell them in bulk. You can take that off the total cost. Additionally, it's more cost effective to produce bulk amounts of a product because it saves on operating costs. So, if you can produce 200 candles for $1 and 10 for the same cost, it's better to take the deal for 200.

Marketing

Marketing wholesale can be a bit difficult. It comes down to the problem of convincing people they need to buy multiple items of whatever product you're selling. For instance, if you are selling the tea lights in bulk, then you need people to want or need to buy more than 10 tea lights at once. If they see no purpose in buying that many at one time, then they won't spend the extra $3 to get the 250 candles. On the plus side, smaller objects like that are generally easier to market as wholesale than larger items. If you are selling something like dresses at wholesale, though, you may be able to market to boutiques that sell clothing.

Buying, selling, and marketing wholesale comes with its own set of challenges. You have to determine if the wholesale price is worth the money or if you will use that many of the item. Additionally, when selling, you have to make the item appealing in bulk to people. Finally, when marketing you have to know the audience to which you are marketing. You won't be able to sell a wholesale order of dresses to most average shoppers, but you may be able to sell a wholesale bag of tea lights to most people that enjoy candles.