Product Sourcing, What is it!

Greetings once again!

As I have noted in my past posts, I have an online store GKS Widgets http://www.gkswidgets.com/ and I sell a variety of products like Medieval Armor & Clothing, Swords, Movie Film Cells, Ethnic Musical Instruments, Hand Carved Loon Lake Decoy Wildlife Replicas and SpecCast Die-Cast Models.

When I first set out on my journey I was wondering what I should sell and if there is anyway to know where and what to sell. I realized from past experience in the retail industry, my father and I ran an Authorized Commodore Amiga Dealership back in the 80's, that it would be important to find legitimate wholesalers of products if I was expecting to profit from the sales of such products. Here is where my first mistake came in. I thought that I could just Google wholesalers and off I would go. I was searching through eBay one night and I came across a product someone was offering for $9.99 that claimed that they had all the tools and information I would need to start an online business and the price looked good so I purchased it. Here was my first mistake and I share it with all of you. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is and indeed was. The product was pretty much garbage and did not lead me in the right direction at all.

Next I did the Google thing and did a search on wholesale distributors. A vast array of items appeared on my screen and I soon saw that I would have to put a whole lot of effort into my research if I was going to be able to glean any real gems from all this information. One thing I will warn you about is there are what are called middlemen out there who disguise themselves as wholesalers and in reality they are stepping in between the true wholesale companies and you so you end up not being able to sell their items at a competitive price. There is also the "Internet Store in the Box" products. Steer away from these. The biggest problem with them is they sell a million of these "Store in a Box" options so you end up with a whole bunch of stores that look identical and everyone ends up selling identicle products. What you really need are unique items that not everyone else is selling. More on this in later posts.

So what was I to do. I begin to slow down my approach because I did not want to fall prey to these scammers. Again I drew on my past experience in retail and decided that time and a bit of money were going to be needed if I was going to sort through all the mess that was out there. I spent the next several weeks researching this whole new world of e-commerce and in future posts I will try to share with you some of the things I learned along the way.

Well, gotta run for now but do me a favor and check out my store GKS Widgets http://www.gkswidgets.com/ and let me know what you think

Grant Skoog
Owner/Gks Widgets
http://www.gkswidgets.com/