The purpose of this tool is to keep track of the suppliers you're reaching out to for potential wholesale accounts, whether they're a manufacturer, distributor, or wholesaler.

A common system for sourcing products is known as Reverse Wholesale Sourcing. You find products that are ranked well (an indicator of good sales volume), and you go after the source of the product (finding a supplier). We'll be showing you how the Vendrive CRM fits well with this sourcing strategy.
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Let's start by looking through products on Amazon. For the purpose of this tutorial, we've found a sample product below:
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​Amazon Link
CAN-C Eye Drops 2x 5ml Vials
​ASIN: B004M32XWE

Add the product to the product tracker by hitting the "Add Product" button at the top right hand of the screen.

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You'll be prompted to add the ASIN or Amazon Product URL of the product, in this case "B004M32XWE", into the prompt which appears.

Click on the "Add Product" button to track this product, and see more information to help you make the decision on whether or not this product is worth pursuing for wholesale reselling.

A good indicator of whether a product is selling well on Amazon is its BSR, which is the "Best Sellers Rank". The lower, the better.

A good ballpark to target is a BSR of under 50,000 (in most categories, like Health & Beauty for example).

You can get an estimate with this BSR by using Jungle Scout's free estimator tool below:

https://www.junglescout.com/estimator/

A good product is one that has a steady BSR over the last few months. This can be checked through the BSR history chart to the left, with different time ranges.

The BSR can occasionally spike during seasonal periods, or one-off events and promotions, which should be looked out for.

A good ballpark to target is a BSR of under 50,000 (in most categories, like Health & Beauty for example).

When evaluating prices you get from a distributor or manufacturer, you should compare them to the buybox price, and ensure that the price is holding relatively steady over the last period of time.

You can check price history for different time ranges in the graph to the right.

The next step is to check for sellers in the buy box rotation. This is the number of sellers which share a spot in the buy box of the product's listing. ~82% of sales on Amazon go through the buy box of a listing.

A good rule of thumb is to find products with 20 or less sellers sharing the buy box when the BSR is on the lower end, with under 10 being more preferable if the BSR is > 20,000 and < 65,000.

Before looking for and approaching manufacturers or distributors of this product, you should find a profitable price point to buy it for in wholesale quantity.

A good ROI (return-on-investment) to aim for is 25%. Meaning, if you spend $1,000 on a product, you'll end with $1,250 after Amazon takes out all its fees and you pay your supplier for the product.

Sample a few different "Cost of Product" values, to see what you should negotiate for during your calls and emails.

When you start receiving price lists from the manufacturers and distributors, you can enter the values here to quickly see how they compare, and whether you'll make enough of a profit.

Now, you'll need to look for a supplier for this product. This step isn't too difficult, as Amazon will provide the brand name of the product.

In the case of this product, the brand is: Can-C

From here, you'll do a Google search for the manufacturer. You can search for things such as:

For Can-C, we were able to find their website, with a contact page, linked below:

Can-C Contact

Let's add this supplier to our pipeline in the next step. From there, we can organize suppliers who we're waiting to reach out to, and ones who are in different stages of contact, up until they either open a wholesale account for you, or deny your application.

Follow the modal to add a new supplier.
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In the future, you may have suppliers which have a large selection of products, so you have the option of adding one of your existing suppliers to a new product, and vice versa.
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In this demo, both the supplier and product are new, so click on "Add a New Supplier".

The only required information to store this supplier is their name. The rest is optional, but will help when the time comes to pick up the phone or send an email.
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For now, fill in Can-C as the supplier name.

Now that you've added the supplier to your account, you can see the products that you have connected to this supplier, and manage the stage of contact you're in with the supplier.

This visual pipeline represents the different stages of contact to keep you organized with each supplier.

Once you've contacted the supplier for the first time, you can update the "stage" of the supplier by clicking on the next block in the pipeline.

Click on the block immediately to the right of the stage highlighted in green:

When reaching out to suppliers, it's important to record any key information that's brought up, such as pricing, or requirements to open a wholesale accounts.
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You can do this in the "Actions" block by either adding text-notes or attaching files, such as price lists to reference later.
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This makes it easier when it comes to the next call/email, or when it comes time to place an order/reorder.

Head over to your main pipeline view to see where all of your "suppliers in progress" will be shown.

Click on the Pipeline button to the left in the sidebar.

When keeping track of multiple suppliers, it can become an organizational nightmare, as most wholesale accounts can take up to a week or longer to open successfully.
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In the pipeline view, you can see where you're at with each of your suppliers.

To easily update the stage a supplier is in, you can drag their respective blocks to the different columns in the pipeline view.
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Try to drag Can-C from the stage it's in now, to the Application Received stage.
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This would mean you received the application from the supplier, but have not yet submitted it.

When you've either successfully opened an account with a supplier, or you were denied, you can update the supplier in this pipeline view by dragging the supplier into one of the bottom three bins (visible when you start dragging).

For the purpose of the demo, let's assume we were able to open a wholesale account with Can-C.

Try dragging Can-C into the third bin, colored green and labeled "Won".

To view all your suppliers, regardless of the state they're in (in-progress, won, or lost), navigate to the Supplier Directory in the sidebar to the left.

Here you can see all of your stored suppliers, with a highlighted color corresponding to the stage they're in.
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Here, you can see that Can-C was a successful supplier.

Get to Sourcing!

That's all we have for the tutorial! If you have any further questions or concerns, feel free to reach out to us in the live chat to the right. We're fairly quick to respond.
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With the Vendrive CRM, we're confident you'll save time and organizational headache with sourcing wholesale products for Amazon.