You will see that the price for wholesale suppliers lists that enable you to acquire wholesale products differ vastly – you will see some for a few hundred dollars and even wholesale lists for free on different websites. It can leave you asking yourself which way is the best way to go.

Before getting started in a retail business, whether traditional or online, it is very important that you buy wholesale goods from a wholesale source. This is the only way that you will be able to stay competitive and make money. However, wholesale suppliers lists and even wholesale directories such as Salehoo are never the best way to go.

The simple reason is that they offer plenty of information. Too much information, in fact. These wholesale suppliers lists are so padded out with thousands of names and addresses that it would take forever for you to sift through them and discover what the best wholesale source for you would be. People get away with charging a lot of money for them because there is a desire from people that want to order wholesale goods to try and find out who these mysterious wholesale sources are.

There is some good news however. Smart wholesale suppliers have figured out that this type of wholesale supplier’s lists are virtually useless to the people that are using them. So instead they have come up with a useful solution known as a centralized wholesale source.

If you haven’t already gotten wind of this approach, let’s explain a few of its benefits. Unlike wholesale suppliers lists, centralized wholesale sources are item based. What this means is that when you login to the system, you will search for a product or a brand name. Much like a traditional online store front, you will be shown matching results.

It’s completely up to you how you decide to advertise the products that you source – but the good news is that you don’t make any purchases until you have made a sale to a customer. The reason for this is that centralized wholesale sources offer a drop shipping solution. So, when you get a sale, you simply place the order and make the payment with the centralized wholesale source.

This is again where a centralized wholesale source is different from wholesale directories or wholesale suppliers lists. You never have to make contact with the wholesale supplier themselves. All the ordering  is done by the centralized wholesale source, meaning that you can order from a few different suppliers in one hit. So you can see really how simple it is to do business in this way.

Before you start buying wholesale supplier’s lists, you should certainly research your alternatives through a centralized wholesale source. The ease of the system means that you can spend more time marketing your items, which in turn means that you will be selling more and making more money.

To understand where Doba type services fit in wholesale supply, you need to know a little about the other kinds of wholesale contact lists that are available.

Firstly, there are websites that serve simply as wholesale contact lists, or wholesale directories, only listing suppliers of wholesale source, closeouts, overstocks and drop shipping. This is commonly known as the ‘no-middleman’ approach, however, due to the massive amount of information offered, it may take an enormous amount of time to locate the correct supplier of the product that you are looking for. In addition to this, when you are negotiating with a wholesale supplier, you will find that there is a huge price variation if you don’t already have a long standing relationship with them.

In addition to this, well known wholesale directories don’t filter their listings, which means there is no distinction between true wholesale suppliers and middlemen. This means that you could end up paying inflated prices for your wholesale items.

This is where systems like Doba come into play. What happens when you join this service is that you are given access to many different suppliers of goods that you are looking for. But instead of digging for the wholesale source that you need, you search by the item that you are looking for.

There is a huge time savings when you take into account that you can directly source the exact product that you are looking for, many of which are branded names. In addition, it doesn’t matter if you are looking for two completely different products with different wholesale suppliers, as you are quickly able to instantly pull up the wholesale brands that you are looking for.

Because systems like this drive a huge amount of business to the wholesale suppliers, when you buy wholesale goods this way, you get the biggest possible discount available.

On top of this, instead of wrestling with orders from a variety of different wholesale suppliers, you will instead simply be ordering using the Doba interface. Even if you were to order from ten different suppliers, you would only need to place one main order and Doba would do the rest.

The one disadvantage that people have with Doba.com is that it doesn’t act as a conventional wholesale source, but rather as a middleman by charging a fixed monthly membership fee and also increasing wholesale prices, however, there are other sites similar to Doba which do provide all the benefits without this one negative. If you are serious that you want to order wholesale merchandise to resell – then using a service like Doba is the best way to go about it.