Sourcing: Wholesale & Marketplace
Wholesale marketplace apps connect your store with vetted brands and suppliers, allowing you to source high-quality products to resell. These platforms act as a curation copilot, helping you discover unique products, manage relationships with vendors, and stock your store with inventory you own.
Key Insights
Discover unique, high-quality products from vetted wholesale suppliers.
Buy inventory at wholesale prices to achieve higher profit margins.
Build a curated product catalog that aligns with your brand.
Manage supplier relationships and purchasing all from one platform.
More in Orders & Fulfillment
Inventory & Order Management
These apps are the backbone of your operations, helping you track inventory, manage orders, and sync stock across multiple channels. Modern systems act as an operations copilot, using AI to provide predictive forecasting for inventory and intelligent routing for orders.
Shipping & Delivery
Shipping and delivery apps streamline your entire fulfillment process, from printing labels to tracking orders. The best apps act as a logistics copilot, using smart analysis to find the cheapest shipping rates and automate complex fulfillment workflows, ensuring customers get their orders quickly and accurately.
Returns, Exchanges & Warranty
Returns, exchanges, and warranty apps transform your post-purchase experience from a cost center into a loyalty driver. These tools act as a retention copilot, providing a self-service portal for customers to manage returns and exchanges, while automating the complex logistics for your team.
Payments, Checkout & Fraud
These critical apps help you get paid, secure your checkout, and prevent losses from fraud. They act as a financial copilot, helping you optimize your checkout for conversions, offer diverse payment options like 'Buy Now, Pay Later', and automatically block fraudulent orders.
Sourcing: Dropshipping
Dropshipping apps connect you with thousands of suppliers, allowing you to sell their products without ever holding inventory yourself. These platforms act as a sourcing copilot, helping you discover trending products, import them to your store with one click, and automate order fulfillment.
Sourcing: Print on Demand (POD)
Print-on-Demand (POD) and manufacturing apps allow you to create and sell custom products without holding any inventory. These platforms act as a production copilot, automatically handling printing, packing, and shipping as soon as an order is placed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1.What are wholesale marketplace apps?
These are platforms that connect independent retailers (like you) with brands and artisans who sell their products at wholesale prices. Unlike dropshipping, you purchase inventory upfront and manage it yourself. These apps, like Faire or Handshake, streamline the discovery and ordering process.
Q2.How do these apps directly improve my store's performance?
They directly improve your profit margins and brand uniqueness. Buying at wholesale prices and selling at retail allows for a significantly higher margin than dropshipping. Sourcing from unique, curated brands also helps you build a differentiated product catalog that can't be easily copied.
Q3.What's a common mistake to avoid with wholesale sourcing?
A common mistake is ordering too much inventory of a new, untested product. Even if the wholesale price is good, you can tie up a lot of capital in slow-moving stock. Start with a small test order that meets the supplier's minimum to validate the product with your audience before placing a larger order.
Q4.How does AI enhance modern wholesale marketplaces?
AI acts as a discovery and curation copilot. It can analyze your current product catalog and sales data to provide personalized recommendations for new brands and products that would be a good fit for your store. It can also help forecast demand to suggest appropriate reorder quantities.
Q5.What's the difference between wholesale and dropshipping?
In wholesale, you buy products in bulk from a supplier, hold the inventory yourself, and ship it to your customers. This means higher risk and work, but also higher profit margins and control. In dropshipping, you don't own any inventory; the supplier ships directly to your customer, resulting in lower risk but also lower margins and less control.
Q6.What is a 'minimum order quantity' (MOQ)?
An MOQ is the smallest quantity of a product that a wholesale supplier is willing to sell in a single order. For example, a supplier might have an MOQ of 12 units for a particular candle. Wholesale marketplaces often have favorable MOQs for independent retailers.
Q7.How do I find the right products for my brand?
Look for products that complement your existing assortment and appeal to your target customer. Use the marketplace's filters to browse by category, brand values (e.g., handmade, eco-friendly), and location. Always read reviews of the supplier and order samples if possible.
Q8.How do I manage inventory I've purchased wholesale?
Once the inventory arrives, you will use a dedicated inventory management app (or Shopify's built-in features) to track your stock levels. This is a crucial step to ensure you don't sell products you don't have and know when to reorder.
Q9.I'm a beginner. How should I get started?
Start by browsing a wholesale marketplace like Faire. Don't commit to buying anything yet. Just explore the categories that fit your brand and see what's available. Pay attention to MOQs and wholesale pricing to get a feel for the economics. This research phase is crucial.
Q10.What is the future of wholesale sourcing?
The future is about data-driven curation and flexible financing. An AI sourcing copilot will not just recommend products but will build entire suggested collections for your store based on real-time market trends. Additionally, we'll see more integrated financing options within these platforms, making it easier for small retailers to invest in inventory.