Regardless of your experience level selling on eBay, there is often one question that comes up. That question is “where do I find products?” This is a common question to all retailers, whether they are online or sell in “brick and mortar” stores. What do the offline stores do? They develop relationships with local wholesalers and distributors for the products that they carry. The same principle applies for people running an online business.

Online sellers always wonder if the distributors and wholesalers will sell to them. The answer to that question is… it depends. Some wholesalers will sell to eBayers, some won’t. Every wholesaler is different.

So how do you start finding wholesalers? Well let me tell you where not to look. Don’t do a regular internet search for them, because most of the websites that you’ll find are false. Don’t believe the hype, no matter how appealing they look to eBay sellers. You might think you won the lottery if you believed all their promises. Sorry, but it’s not true.

Why? Well these websites aren’t really the wholesalers at all. That’s because wholesalers and distributors don’t have to advertise for eBay sellers. Wholesalers already have enough offline business when they deal with regular retail stores. Instead, these sites are made by “middlemen” that make the connections to the wholesaler, then mark up the products before they re-sell them to you. Usually the mark-up is much too great to be useful to you, and you’ll find that the prices you purchased products at are too high to make sense for you to sell on eBay.

So what do we do now? Well first you need to realize that the web isn’t the best source for you to Wholesalers aren’t on the edge of internet technology. They do business mainly by telephone because it’s worked for them for decades. In my experience, the best wholesalers that we’ve found don’t have websites, or they have websites that are difficult to use or find. So how do you find wholesalers if you can’t search on the web? The best way is to go to the top. In this case, it’s the manufacturer. Call the manufacturer by looking through the product documentation or warranty card.

Remember that the wholesaler’s role is to help the manufacturer. How do they do this? It’s because the manufacturer doesn’t have to worry about selling and keeping track of products. The manufacturer makes the stuff, and then they give it to their wholesaler. All you need to do is ask the manufacturer for the nearest wholesaler or distributor to you.

Jesse Holmes is an eBay PowerSeller who has been making money on eBay for more than 3 years. Before you start to sell on eBay, don’t miss his excellent free eBay Business Start Up Kit, showing you step by step how to learn to sell on eBay.