Mastering Supplier Recruiting: Tips for 2025

What's up guys, Trevor here with eCommerce Paradise and today I want to talk to you about five tips for supplier recruiting in 2025 and finding the best suppliers.

So your first time listening to the podcast or watching my YouTube channel, definitely get my free mini course and niches list for high ticket dropshipping. You can find it at eCommerceParadise.com slash free course or click the link below in the description.

And this is a course where I show you the overviews of why high ticket dropshipping is amazing, how it works and how to get started and what niches you can choose as well as you know, why you'd want to choose them and how to research niches and how to do competitor research, which is the most important part. All right, so let's get into it. So finding suppliers is pretty simple. All you got to do is research, you know, Google and through Google shopping ads.

And I would recommend just like typing in product categories at first, try to find online stores that are selling on Shopify that do not have retail locations that have multiple brands. That's kind of the criteria we work with to find high ticket dropshipping competitors. And then, you know, how you know a store is on Shopify, you can just look at the URL structure. If it's slash collection slash or slash product slash, you know, it's a Shopify store.

To find the retail location, if they have one or not, just go to the footer of the website or the contact us page. It's really easy. Most stores that do have a retail location are going to prominently show it. If they have an address on their website, you can just click into Google to find if their address is a storefront or if it's just like a home or if it's a virtual office or some kind of a virtual address location.

If it happens to be a warehouse or a brick and mortar store, then it might be more difficult to get some of the suppliers that they have on board, but that doesn't mean all their suppliers aren't going to drop ship for you. But if they do have like a home address or a virtual address office address, that means that most likely all their suppliers are going to be drop shipping suppliers.

So you can extract their entire list of brands from their website, put them into a list, find their contact information through Google, you know, just organic search results, and then contact them. And I provide a full supplier recruiting call and email template in my high-ticket dropshipping masterclass, as well as my high-ticket dropshipping Neshax course. You can check all that out at academy.ecommerceparadise.com. You also get a free mini course there as well.

So let's talk about how to find suppliers and how to get the best ones. So finding suppliers in high-ticket dropshipping is pretty easy. Now, there's also some dropshipping directories that you can use online to find high-ticket suppliers too, as well. I'm actually in the works of setting up a high-ticket dropshipping supplier directory with over, you know, 1300, no, sorry, over 10,000 suppliers, you know, manufacturers directly and distributors that sell multiple suppliers.

So I'm really excited to get that going. And I'm going to be launching that soon. So I'll keep you guys posted on that.

So let's talk about it. So when you're trying to reach out to suppliers, the best thing you can do is call and email. It's just really simple. And when you call them, make sure it's during their business hours. And you want to call different times of the day, because sometimes you might not get through to the person you need to talk to.

But mainly you're going to call and you're just going to ask for the person that sets up new dealer accounts and ask if they're setting up new dealer accounts for online e-commerce only dropshipping stores. Explain to them who you are and where you're from and how long you've been doing business and how much experience you have and what kind of value you can provide them. Usually what I tell them is that we take care of all the marketing, all the advertising.

So we save them a lot of money and we do a ton of optimization and we put all their products on our website for free of charge. And then we also do email marketing and follow-up and sales and we close sales on their products. So it's basically like them having an entire marketing, advertising and sales team working for them without them having to spend any money up front. So it's a really good deal for them. And the other thing we do for them is we provide really good customer service.

All we expect from them is to provide the product to be shipped out and arrive in good condition with no damage. And also for them to provide warranty support and any support if there happens to be a return issue from the customer. So to accept returns and to also, you know, to provide warranty support in case the product shows up damaged, providing replacement parts and support as far as that goes.

So the way you find out if a supplier is good or not in the beginning before you work with them is that you can look online for reviews of their products. Go to marketplaces like Amazon or eBay and just look for listings or competitor sites too and just see if the reviews are good or bad about the product quality. Okay. So oftentimes some suppliers will kind of like skimp on product quality or packaging and you'll see that in the reviews, a lot of damaged products and stuff like that.

So if you see that, it's probably best to avoid those suppliers. You know, you're going to be taking the risk because you accept the payments. So if something goes wrong with the product, it is likely that customers will file chargebacks. You can avoid chargebacks just by simply communicating with the customer and asking them to be patient, to not file anything with their bank, but it doesn't always work.

So sometimes customers will just file chargebacks and there's nothing you can do about it. So, I get more into that in more videos specifically about chargebacks and how to handle with that. So I'm not going to go into this one, but we're going to focus on how to get suppliers and which ones to get out to.

So it's really good to focus on working directly with the manufacturer. When you work with a distributor, sometimes you get good margins, but sometimes a distributor takes a deep cut of the margin. So if the margins start out at like 20, 30, 40%, sometimes distributors will take up to half of that margin. So you're working with like a 10, 20, 30% margin or something like that,

which is still decent. but what I usually try to do is I don't work with suppliers that give me under a 15% net margin after all shipping costs. That's like the bottom line I'll work with. 20% to 40% is key. 30% to 40% is ideal because then I can make more money to spend more money on ads, marketing, and pay my team as well. So the best way to work with your manufacturer to get that really good margin is to negotiate when you're setting up the dealer account.

You know, just ask them, what are the margins? Do you guys have different tiers?

What does it take to get to a different tier and to sell more, you know, higher margin products? Okay. As far as phone and email outreach, some tips, I guess you would go to Google to find the contact information of that supplier. It should be listed right on their website, but you can also use a tool called hunter.io and plug in the domain and it might be able to find you the email that goes direct to the owners or the managers or the, you know, some other people on the website.

So you're not just reaching out to like the sales team or supplier or you know what I mean, like the support team that might just ignore your email. Okay, so you want to find those people. And if you have trouble reaching out to those people, you can also use social media networks like LinkedIn. And you can try to find people that associated with that business, the owners and whatnot, and then reach out to them directly through there as well.

Another good idea too, is when you're sending these emails, don't just make them a blank email, but you can make a Loom video. Loom.com is a really cool tool, makes it really easy to make videos, your face is in the corner and you can kind of show your website and just do an intro of your company. And it saves them a lot of time before they even have a call with you, they can watch your video. Okay. So people in sales do this all the time, you know, so definitely use it for recruiting as well.

If you have any trouble answering questions that suppliers give you, you can definitely use ChatGBT to help you answer them. Okay. It's just like a job interview.

When you're on a job interview, ChatGBT is an invaluable resource for answering questions that are complicated you know fake it till you make it is kind of a thing and it's a really good idea just to kind of you know look at their website first and get an idea of their product catalog and what they offer and how they're different and unique from their competition and just let them know that you understand what they're selling

and how they're differentiated you can kind of build rapport with them by complimenting them and things like that as well but if they have any questions about like advanced marketing stuff you're doing you should already know what you're doing but if you don't just use chat gbt it'll give you really good answers for all your stuff Okay, just have it ready and you can type stuff in. And if you don't have an answer, just tell them, hey, look, I don't have grants

for that at the moment. I'll get back to you with that. Okay. Most of the time they'll understand. And if it's just through email, of course, then you have a lot of time to like be able to prepare. You don't have to be on the spot about it.

Yeah. And then your location matters a lot too. So a lot of suppliers are going to wonder like where you're located. What I usually recommend is you set up an LLC in Wyoming or South Dakota, somewhere where it's, you know, don't have any income tax, no franchise tax, and you can easily get a seller's permit. But things are changing nowadays a lot too. And it really depends on where in the U.S. you're located or where in the world you're located.

If you're located outside the U.S., it is a bit easier because you can decide wherever in the U.S. you want to work. And right now, it seems like the easiest place to establish a business is actually South Dakota because Wyoming is no longer issuing seller's permits to people that don't meet their minimum threshold for sales in the state and don't have a physical location. So it used to be the best thing was Wyoming, but now it's not.

So go check out South Dakota. No franchise fee, no income tax. If you're an American, it's actually very easy to establish a residence there as well. All you have to do is fly there or even drive there and stay at either a campsite or a hotel for at least one night. Get a virtual address at a place called America's Mailbox. And then you just go into the DMV, provide them the virtual mailbox address, your hotel receipt or your campsite receipt or whatever.

And then your ID from the other state. And that's all they really need. And you pay a fee. And then you get a South Dakota driver's license and register to vote. And then you're a South Dakota resident. You pay zero income tax in the state, no franchise tax in your business. And yeah, South Dakota is a really cool state too. It's really beautiful and it's kind of fun. Cool culture there. Nice people. So check out South Dakota, guys. It's really neat.

Yeah. And just go on, when you get on board with a supplier, you definitely want to get a lot of information from them. You want to get their price sheets, inventory sheets, high quality images, product descriptions, things like that. You definitely want to rewrite the product descriptions using ChatGBT or Claude or, you know, one of the other AI writing tools like KoalaWriter. But it's definitely a good idea to get the specifications for the products. That's the most important part.

You want to get all their policies as well, like their return policy, warranty policy, shipping policy, things like that. And you want to just, you know, really focus on building out really good product listings for the products. And then later on, you'll go through and you optimize. You want to figure out what your competitors are doing that you're not. So make sure that the pricing is set at map pricing on all your competitor sites.

Report any that aren't and then make sure that you're offering discount codes, expiring discount codes that match what your suppliers are offering. So if you're starting at like a 5%, which is pretty normal, but your competitors have 10% or something like that, or even 15%, definitely want to match that. I'm assuming that they're going to be for higher margin products. So definitely consider that.

You also want to consider all the different variants and add-ons that you can offer for products, as well as free gift packages, you know, white glove delivery and extended warranty. Those kinds of things matter a lot. So that's kind of down the road later as you optimize, but you know, it's just really important. So consider that.

All right. So yeah, that's it guys. Supplier recruiting is definitely super important with, you know, high ticket dropshipping. In the future, what I'll be doing is kind of over the shoulder videos on each of these topics, like niche research, store building, supplier recruiting is kind of the most requested ones, just kind of stuff you need to know to get started. And then I'll be doing more advanced stuff with like Google ads, SEO, email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing.

Because my plan with eCommerce Paradise is to grow more into an agency where I'm helping people to scale their stores and working outside of just the high ticket dropshipping world, where I'm working with retailers, whether online retailers, whether they sell high ticket products or low ticket products, whether they're online only or they're click and mortar, but they have to have an eCommerce presence, obviously. And then I'm also considering working with direct consumer brands as well.

So if you know anybody or if you have a store that you're currently looking to scale, definitely hit me up. Let me know. Trevor at ecommerceparadise.com is my email. You can look me up on LinkedIn. You can connect there. I'm on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. You can definitely look me up anywhere and comment below. And of course, subscribe, like in the video, check out the podcast, subscribe to that ecommerce paradise podcast, and I'll see you guys in the next one.