How to Find Suppliers Through Manufacturer Directories

I was just looking over a previous post the other day about finding dropshippers or suppliers for your site (you can read that post here) and I realized that I left out one of the other techniques for finding a supplier: looking through manufacturer directories!

There are several of these directories out there. Here’s a list of a couple that you’ll want to consider:

ThomasNet
TradeKey
Alibaba (mostly Asian manufacturers)
eSources (UK directory)

There are others of course, but you could at least get started with these.

So here’s the concept with contacting manufacturers: ideally you want to get as close to the source as you possibly can. It keeps your profit margins a lot better because you’re cutting out a lot of the middlemen. Not all manufacturers will be interested in doing a dropship arrangement with you. You can always talk to them and explain the concept a bit and you may persuade some of them to try it out with you. Others will just say that they only sell in bulk. If this happens, you next step would be to ask them who some of their main distributors are and then work up the line until you find a distributor/wholesaler that will do dropshipping for you.

This method of finding suppliers is a little bit more in depth and may take more time, but by going about things this way you might be able to arrange some type of agreement that few others will take the time to get. What you might consider doing is starting out with a company like Doba or The Shipper to supply your site for the short term, but in the mean time keep working with finding a supplier this way and make the switch when you’ve found some that will work with you.

Related Posts