Weeding through the available drop ship suppliers for your business can, at times, be tedious. Still, if you want to make sure you have a reliable supplier who can provide your customers the right product at a price that allows you to make a profit, you need to go through the process. While you can obviously lessen your workload by finding a reliable online database of drop ship suppliers, there are some specific things you ought to do as well to verify the legitimacy of a given supplier.
How do you do that, exactly? The best approach seems to be a multi-pronged one. You start by making sure that your drop ship supplier directory service is legitimate, current and reliable. They’ll weed out the worst of the worst when it comes to suppliers, and they’ll keep scammers from getting through to you, as well.
Beyond that, though, you should still do some verification on your own. For example, you might decide to run a financial report on a potential wholesale supplier. A D&B (Dunn & Bradstreet) report can tell you a lot about a company’s history, financial standing, and even their payment trends. In addition, a D&B report will give you information about the company’s creditworthiness, as well as any credit limit recommendations that D&B might recommend.
You should also consider doing a legal records search. A legal records search can turn up a number of important pieces of information about a company. For example, you can see if the supplier has filed bankruptcy. You can check to see if their are suits or liens against a company. All of these things can, and should, play some role or another in your selecting the right wholesale vendor.
While we’ve often talked here about word of mouth when it comes to wholesale suppliers, the fact of the matter is you can’t always rely only on customer recommendations. Some customers might get lucky, or a wholesale supplier might even stack the deck by providing references inside the company. Using online wholesale supplier directories, financial reports and legal searches allows you to fully trust a potential supplier before you ever do business with them.
Vetting potential suppliers in this way will save you time, money and headaches in the long run. Perhaps most important, it could save your business’ reputation and avoid losing repeat business because of a supplier that’s less than stellar.
Recent Comments