Suppliers: Contacting Suppliers
Why and when should I reach out to the supplier?
Because Inventory Source is strictly a software company, we do not act as a middleman between you and your suppliers. We encourage you to form your relationships with your suppliers and figure out what is involved in working with them from a B2B standpoint. We encourage this because their policies or procedures must be taken up with them; we don't regulate or have any say over them. Forming this relationship ensures you are not sourcing products with a markup from a middleman, as well as giving you the opportunity to qualify for possible volume discounts, seasonal discounts, or any other reseller specials that they may offer. We also strongly encourage forming this relationship with your supplier before setting up an integration with Inventory Source so that you have all your questions answered prior to paying for an integration. You can view the contact information for each of our suppliers in our Supplier Directory.Here's a checklist of what to discuss with them:
- Ordering Processing Procedures: How do they want you do place an order once it comes in? Do they charge an order processing fee (this also may be referred to as a dropshipping fee)? Do they have a order limit (whether it's price or quantity) on the amount required to place an order?
- Shipping Policies: Do they have any restrictions on where they won't ship to? Do they use UPS, FedEx, or USPS? What is their processing turnover rate for shipping an order once it's placed? What are their shipping fees?
- Returns/ Refund Polices: How do they want you to place a return request or a refund request?
- Additional Fees: Are there any additional fees that you should be aware of? Monthly subscription costs? Yearly subscription costs?
- Brand Approval: Are there any brands that are included within their feed that you will need additional brand approval for to sell their items? If so: Do they have the applications for those brands? Or do they have contact information in order for you to reach out to get those brand applications?
What is Inventory Source's role in the dropshipping process?
We are a software company that focuses on helping our customers sell more products while spending less time managing them. What we mean by that is helping you manage data in your suppliers feeds, such as adjusting the prices to best fit your business model and pricing strategy, mapping the products to categories that best fit your stores category structure, and by allowing you to filter products that don't fit your eCommerce business plan. We try to help you manage all of this with using our tools for a low cost, and in turn it'll take less time, and fewer headaches in the future.