How to recruit quality resellers/drop-shipers etc?

Quality is hard to get !? or are we looking elsewhere?

[buldag]

We are a small consumer electronics distributor, with our own brand in the market, primarily marketing products via the internet. Our brands are in the growth stage in their PLC (product life cycle) and interestingly the large names (e.g. samsungs, sony etc.) are yet to enter this category.

Over the past 4-5 months we have had relatively less success in recruiting "quality" resellers. We have about 5-6 resellers already with us, but our growth in recruitment hasnt been significant enough. We *think* we provide ample support/margins to our resellers... and thats why none of our resellers have left us. But havent found some good quality resellers joining us.

We are not interested in gowing with the giant distributors like Ingram and TechData - I think their channel structure defeats the whole e-commerce dis-intermediation model.

Would like to get some ideas going w.r.t. our strategy and what may be going on? Is our small size a detriment to our legitimacy or validity? How do small businesses achieve higher levels of distribution? Should we be looking at some places which we havent been?

thanks for any help!

[sun818]

I know one distributor sold to one of the major players at cost. Then after that product gets on the search engines, you can cold call those resellers to buy from you directly.

You have other factors to consider like (not in order of importance)

* how accurate are your pictures and description?
* is the copy easy to understand and well written (e.g. not written by non-native English writer)
* do you offer drop shipping?
* how do resellers become aware of changes in price, stock status, or description changes?
* do you offer meta-data like unit weight, country of origin, case quantity?

[ytswy]

Distributors that we start doing business with tend to fall into two categories. The biggies, who we know who they are, and go to because we know they sell product that we need, and small ones that have hired someone who we have dealt with before.

I do think that personal contacts are hugely important for a small distributor - if you've got someone who's well connected they can just start calling round resellers and chatting to them in a way that you just can't do on a cold call.

Once you've made personal contact, offering goodies like co-op marketing money can go a long way towards cementing the relationship.

Disclaimer: I don't have any experience in working for either distributors or large resellers, so this may not be good general advice.