Judging the Wholesale Market

With so many options available for you to import your wholesale bath bombs it doesn't make sense for you to tie up that much resource for inventory. The main problem is going to be in order to hit the best pricing mark with imported items a container load is the most likely option. To get to this pricing level there is also the time factor in order to receive a container of imported product. Your general lead time is going to be about 30 days at a minimum so you will have your product tied up in shipment for at least 30 days. You will also have your financial resources tied up for at least 30 days. The other issue is that products that are imported have a higher damage percentage than items that are sourced locally and don't have to travel as far. So even though at times it looks like an attractive option, in the long run after figuring in these factors it might not save you any money at all. Your choices also will be limited and if you find that one of your products is moving extremely fast and one is not moving at all you are now stuck with a certain quantity of product in inventory that is a slow mover.

If you were to source this locally you would be able to reorder at much lower quantities for the item that was more popular. In order to find out which products are going to move more quickly it is advantageous to get feedback from the marketplace right away. Sometimes going to a market on the weekend so you can see from the marketplace which items are going to be strong movers before you make a commitment to a large amount of product is advantageous and will help you make better choices about your inventory and inventory levels. Some retailers will use a combination of sourcing locally and sourcing overseas so that they have the option to replenish their shelves when they are running low on product or if they have a particular run on a product that is not part of their normal selling cycle. The other thing that selling at a temporary market will help you with is your pricing structure. You can run experiments on different weekends to see what type of pricing is best for you and your inventory levels. This way if you sell a product more cheaply you will definitely move more product but it might not be advantageous to do so as your margins will be lower and you might run out of preferred product more quickly. If you have higher pricing you will move your product more slowly but you will have higher margins and sometimes once again a combination of both of these types of marketing will get you the most data in the end.

You want to try and get from the marketplace as much data as you can which will be extremely helpful for you moving forward on making better business decisions. You can also get good feedback by offering products on a temporary basis on eBay or on Google ad words so that you can find which products will be more popular before you invest in inventory. Getting this early data is going to be key to having a successful business and if you can do it at a nominal cost you will be ahead of all of your competitors. So look at these two ideas for getting the data you need before you make large purchase orders.