Once you’ve found a product that has sales demand on Amazon and you’re thinking of selling your own version of it, the first step that you’ll need to take is to reach out to Amazon FBA suppliers so that you can learn more about whether an idea that you’ve got is feasible, and the costs involved.
If you’re new to the world of Amazon FBA, then this step alone might seem quite overwhelming, so in this article I’m going to be walking you through the process of finding and then contacting a supplier for your chosen product, which is going to include some suggested questions to help you get the information that you’ll need to make a decision.
In the olden days, sourcing and contacting suppliers used to be pretty difficult and often relied on pre-existing relationships. But thanks to the power of the internet, contacting suppliers has never been easier or quicker, with the most common websites to find these guys being Ali Baba, DHGate and Indiamart.
Ali Baba is the biggest source of manufacturers out there, with over 100,000 suppliers predominantely based in China and the far east registered on the site, all ready and waiting to be contacted by you. Because it’s such a big marketplace that has never let me down when it comes to sourcing the supplier of any product that I want to sell, it’s top of the list of all of the sites that I’ve used, so I’d highly recommend that you try it out.
Steps To Finding An Amazon FBA Supplier
So as soon as you find a product that you may want to sell on Amazon, and you’ve confirmed that it has sales demand using Helium 10, you’re going to need to make contact with suppliers in order to see whether it’s going to be profitable to sell.
Confirming demand with Helium 10
The quickest way of finding the best suppliers is by running Helium 10’s X-Ray tool, and then pressing the Find Suppliers button (top right corner of the above picture). You can then filter suppliers by their price, minimum order quantity, and the country that they’re from. If you like what you see and want to make contact, just click their name to load up their listing, where you can browse what they’re selling in more detail.
If you don’t have Helium 10 or you want to search for suppliers using the old school way, just head to Alibaba.com, type in the product that you want to sell, and browse the results as soon as they load.
Once you’ve looked through your list of suppliers, you’re going to need to choose at least 5 of them that you can message, to get an idea of costs and what’s possible when It comes to adding your own branding on the product. Ideally suppliers that you message should have a verified or gold badge next to their name, which means that they’ve passed Ali Baba’s own manufacturer requirements.
Contacting Amazon FBA Suppliers
Contacting suppliers on Ali Baba is actually really straightforward, and you can either choose to send a customized and personal message to each supplier individually, or in a bulk which is going to save you a tonne of time, but won’t contain personal items such as the suppliers name or any specific details according to the factory that you’ve messaged.
To message a supplier individually, simply click into a listing, and press the ‘Contact Supplier’ button, and there you can then insert whatever it is that you want to ask the supplier.
If you want to save yourself a load of time and message suppliers in bulk, from the Ali Baba search result page, tick the ‘compare’ box for each supplier that you want to message, and once you’ve done that, press the ‘contact supplier’ button at the bottom, paste your message in to the ‘Detailed Requirements’ box and then hit send – a huge time saving hack for you there.
What To Say To Amazon FBA Suppliers
When contacting suppliers for the first time, try to get as much information out of them from your initial message so that there’s no back and forth or misunderstandings, which could result in you wasting a lot of time. Generally speaking, questions that you should be asking should be related to how much it’s going to cost to get your product manufactured, how experienced they are when it comes to making the product and then shipping it to the country that you want to sell in, and whether they’re prepared to add your own branding to the product if you only want to order a couple of hundred units.
Here are some example questions you can ask your Amazon FBA suppliers:
- Confirm if you are a trading company or manufacturer?
- What is unit cost for 200 units, 500 units, 1,000 units
- Please provide a shipping quotation to an Amazon Fulfilment Center in the UK / US / Europe
- What is your minimum order quantity?
- Are you able to put our branding on the product for X units?
- at is the sample cost with shipping by Air Express DDP to the UK / US / Europe?
Choosing An Amazon FBA Supplier
After you’ve started messaging suppliers that you want to buy products from, you should expect to hear back from them within 2-3 days. When assessing each supplier that responds to you, don’t just judge them based on the price that they want to charge you. A supplier that has good communication skills, is responsive, and actually understands what it is that you want to sell, is going to be way more valuable to you, than one that charges a lower price, but takes ages to reply and can’t speak a word of the Queen’s English. In my experience, the cheapest suppliers are usually the least reliable and have the worst quality products, which leads to bad reviews, refunds, and you not making any profit.
Once you find a supplier that has good communication skills and seems to offer a sensible price, that’s when you can then move to the next stage, where you’ll be assessing your product’s profitability, your own ability to differentiate, as well as the quality of the product sample that you’ll soon be ordering.
So that’s the process finding and messaging the best suppliers for any product that you want to sell. Regardless of whether you’ve already found a product that you really like the look of already, you should start to message these guys anyway, just so that you can get used to the process and get an idea of the level of English and communication skills that you should expect.
If you’d like additional help with finding an Amazon FBA supplier, check out my free Amazon FBA training, or alternatively, for even more help, join my mentor programme the Smashers Academy. You can also read my Amazon FBA review here.
