4 Tactics to Maximize Returns

By Mark Di Vincenzo
Mark Di Vincenzo is a journalist with 24 years of experience, a New York Times best-selling author and blogger with Contently.com.

Buying low and selling high is a goal of anyone who wants to make money, whether they invest in stocks and commodities or they see something at a garage sale that they think they can resell at a profit. Wholesalers are all about buying low and selling high, and it helps explain why they have the potential to make a lot of money — and why the best ones do.

The most successful wholesalers have their own tricks of the trade that help them beat their competition, but they all basically do these four things, and do them well:

Deal in popular, everyday products. The best wholesalers sell what the masses want to buy, such as clothes, accessories, electronics, purses and jewelry.  Doing this ensures they’ll broaden their market and have more potential customers. The more potential customers, the more likely they can make lots of sales. The best wholesalers find a specialized niche they can run with — for example, a product that sells well regionally but has the potential to sell well nationally.

Sell high-quality products. Selling popular items might allow wholesalers to make a quick buck, but they won’t stay in business very long if they’re selling junk.

Resist the temptation to take advantage of a great deal from a supplier who’s selling low-quality merchandise. Employ an excellent quality-control worker who knows the good stuff from the bad.

The best wholesalers depend on repeat customers, and the best way to ensure repeat customers is to sell high-quality items at a fair price. Selling cheap merchandise will not only turn off a wholesaler’s customers, but the customers – or rather, the former customers – will trash him to potential customers.

Develop fast operations. This almost doesn’t require any explanation, but we live in a society where we get impatient if we spend more than a couple of minutes waiting for hamburgers and fries in a drive-thru line.

The best wholesalers fine-tune their operations so that their suppliers ship to them quickly and their customers don’t have to wait long for their purchases.  Customers expect whatever they buy to get to them as fast as possible.

Market your products well. Any good businessman or woman knows that few things are more important than marketing. If they’ve got a great product to sell or service to offer, and no one knows about it, then they won’t stay in business very long.

The most successful wholesalers employ a marketing professional. They also get tips from the suppliers, who know the product better than anyone, and develop relationships with business professors whose students can turn the wholesaler’s marketing problem into their class project.

Buying low and selling high should always be your goal, of course, but make sure you’re selling popular, high-quality merchandise that potential customers are aware of and that you can get in and out the door very quickly.

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Part 3 in a 5-week series titled “So You Want to Be a Wholesaler?” – an introduction to starting and optimizing your wholesale business for success. Over the next few weeks, we’ll dive into many of these subjects in greater detail and provide tried and tested insights from other successful business owners, industry experts and even some of the leadership at TechLiquidators.