Where To Find POPULAR Products?

Second the alibaba recommendation. Dealextreme is another place you can research.

If the OP wants to obtain products from a safe source starting off with small orders and scaling up as sales warrant it, buying direct from an overseas manufacturer is the way to go.

Rather than just take careless advice that you read on forums, first have a look at reviews dealing with the sourcing sites suggested. It is worth noting that dealXtreme (DX.com which is owned by madeinchina.com) buys reviews by giving credit points for every review posted after they approve it. In other words if the review is negative, they obviously don't approve it, so they don't give away any points.

A good place to start looking for reviews is Ripoff Report | Scams, reviews, complaints, lawsuits and frauds. File a report, post your review. Consumers educating consumers. where you will find a huge number of negative reports on Alibaba and a smaller number on dealxtreme. You will find plenty of adverse reviews on them at other review sites.

I recommend a couple of safe sourcing sites that to my knowledge have never had any complaints posted about them. For a start, if they list a supplier as a manufacturer, you can be sure that is what they are. On the popular sites frequently mentioned on forums, most suppliers listed as manufacturers are definitely not.

Don't believe the myth that to buy direct from the factory you must place huge orders. I have taught hundreds of newbie importers how to get around the big MOQs quoted by manufacturers and get them to supply small orders at ex-factory prices.

The profits you can make on such orders is far more than dropship resellers could imagine in their wildest dreams.
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Have you done any research on Alibaba? Have look at my post immediately before yours.

If you go to the trouble of checking out ripoffreport.com you will find a very large number of people very unhappy about their experience in buying products through Alibaba.

Alibaba admitted that 2336 of their suppliers had ripped off buyers. If anyone is interested I will post a link to the newspaper report.

Thanks for drawing attention to the difference between products that are popular and those that are profitable.

Many people think that any sales are better than none, but in effect they are just working for eBay, Amazon, PayPal, and the Postal Service - not for themselves. I often see posts in which warriors boast about high turnover but they rarely talk about profit.

They might be selling popular products, but so many posts on WF reveal that profit margins for most vendors are very low.

Your emphasis on predictability is valuable advice. It does not make sense to just guess that because a product is popular you can make money selling it.
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Hi amcg,

Amazon and eBay are not places for sourcing products unless you are willing to spend many, many hours trying to make money on arbitrage sales, but they can be valuable for market research as you say.

Alibaba is another story, and I have already drawn attention in this thread to the fact that a lot of people have had bad experiences with Alibaba. I would strongly advise against using them for sourcing purposes.

I suggest that they are not a good place for market research either, mainly because, assuming you are researching possible costs you will find two major drawbacks:

You will be getting quotes in most cases from traders or wholesalers, although they say they are manufacturers. This means you will assume that the cost of the items you want to buy will be too high. The reason is simple:

Traders and wholesalers can never quote as low as the real manufacturers can, because there is a big profit margin added to the manufacturers' prices. After all where do the wholesalers buy from?

In addition to that, traders and wholesalers are very inflexible in regard to the big MOQs they quote. One reason is that they hope to make a killing on the one big order because they know they won't get a repeat order from you. The other reason is that unless they go to the manufacturer with a very big order they will be ignored.

So you might ask: "Why don't manufacturers also ignore the little buyers who can't afford to place large orders?" In most cases they do, but that is because those newbies tell them the wrong things and ask them the wrong things. I have taught hundreds of people how to get manufacturers to supply small quantities.

Hi Chris,

I assume when you say you first started wholesaling you mean buying wholesale. I always wonder what is the attraction of buying wholesale when resellers could be setting their sights much higher.

Wholesalers buy from manufacturers, obviously at much lower prices than those wholesalers will charge you. If Warriors only knew how much lower those prices are and what a huge difference there is in profit margins, nobody would be looking for wholesale sources.

Although there are still products manufactured in western countries, the reality is that millions of jobs have been exported and the bulk of consumer products are now manufactured in Asia, particularly China.

Wholesalers buy from those Asian manufacturers at incredibly low prices. Some of those wholesalers are in China, and you will find them on many sourcing sites pretending to be the actual manufacturers, but quoting prices way, way above what the real manufacturers charge.

Other wholesalers buy direct from the real manufacturers and then import those goods and sell at massive profits to people who don't know that it is possible to buy direct from the factory instead of paying those inflated wholesale prices.

If you want to work less and make more profit, consider buying factory direct ex China in small quantities if you want to. You could even expand and buy big quantities, and become a wholesaler, selling to others who don't know how to get those low prices.
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