Where to Source Products to Sell

There are four ways to get something to sell, and they are different businesses wearing the same name. The economics differ, the work differs, and so does the way each one fails. Most sellers who stall have picked a route that does not suit their capital, their patience or their appetite for risk, rather than picked a bad product.

Buy established brands from an authorised distributor and resell them. The products already sell, the demand is proven, and there is nothing to invent. It needs working capital, a real business account with distributors, and tolerance for thin margins fought over with other resellers. The failure mode is a category where five sellers all reprice each other into the ground. It also needs invoices you can produce on request, because authenticity checks are routine and a supply chain you cannot document is a suspension waiting to happen.

Put your own brand on a manufactured product. Higher margins, control of the listing, and something that can become an asset. It needs a trademark to be defensible, upfront stock, and a launch that costs money before it earns any. The failure mode is a product that is identical to nine others with a different logo, which is a race with none of the advantages of wholesale. The version that works starts from a complaint. Read the negative reviews on the category leaders, find the fault that repeats and is fixable, and make that product properly.

Buy discounted stock from retailers and resell it. Almost no capital, immediate feedback, and a genuine way to learn how the marketplace behaves. It does not scale, the sourcing is the whole job and never stops, and many brands are gated in ways arbitrage cannot pass. Treat it as an apprenticeship rather than a business model.

Design it, tool it, own it. The best margins and the only route with a real moat at the end. It needs capital, time, and a tolerance for the first production run being wrong. It is where a successful private label line goes rather than where a first-time seller starts.

A fifth route people expect to see here, and the reason it is not in the four is that most of what is sold as dropshipping is not allowed on Amazon: buying from another retailer and having them ship to your customer breaches the dropshipping policy outright. What is allowed is being the seller of record with a supplier who ships on your behalf, with your details on the packing slip and nobody else's. That is a legitimate arrangement and it is a supply relationship rather than a shortcut. The economics are the harder objection. You carry the marketplace fees and the customer service without the margin that comes from owning stock, and you have no control over the thing that decides your metrics, which is whether it ships on time.

Ask for a sample and pay for it. Ask what their minimum order is and what it is really. Ask who else they supply into your marketplace, because the honest answer changes what you are buying. Check they can produce the compliance documents your category needs before you order, not after. Safety marking, test reports and material declarations are cheap to get with an order and slow to get without one. And on wholesale, verify the distributor is authorised. A supply chain that cannot be documented is worth less than the discount that made it attractive.

Sourcing decides most of what happens afterwards, which is why it comes up before anything else on a new Amazon account: the margin, the defensibility and the compliance risk are all set at the point of purchase. The route also decides which marketplaces suit you. Wholesale catalogues often do better on Walmart and eBay than people expect, because there is less competition per listing. If you are choosing between routes rather than between products, that is the more useful conversation to have.

Related reading: How to Start Selling on Amazon: The Account, the Product, the First Listing and When Import Duties Rise, Raising the Price Is the Last Move.