Great question

> If you do have a specific brand product in mind, how do you actually find
> wholesale prices? Do you somehow get set up with the corporate office, go
> through a wholesale supply, or what? Everytime I try to find a wholesale
> source on the web, I don't really seem to find it.

That's a great question Bee, and something I haven't totally figured out yet myself. I do know that looking for wholesalers on the Internet is usually pretty fruitless. Reason being - everyone and their brother claims to be a wholesaler. In reality, they are usually a middle-man, for the middle-mans middle-man, if you get my drift.

In my friends case, he started buying tool kits from other sellers on eBay. He would contact them directly and offer to buy 5 or 10 kits if they would lower their price. He also did some affiliate sales through Amazon and ToolKing. After doing that a while, other sellers started contacting him and offering to sell to him at better prices. Eventually, he called DeWalt and asked for a meeting with a regional sales rep. Today, he has a personal DeWalt rep who calls him almost every day. He's not big enough to buy direct yet (imagine that), but they've hooked him up with a handful of local wholesalers who constantly have stuff to sell him. DeWalt does drop-ship for him too, but only if the order is large enough.

For stuff you might be wanting to sell, a good place to start is to find out who actually manufactures the item and contact them directly. Just look at the packaging - it's almost always stamped on their someplace. If you are setup as a legitimate business (sales tax license and all) they should be happy to talk to you. If you can't buy direct, they will usually hook you up with your nearest distributor. After a few phone calls, you should have a source or two you can purchase from.

I'd be very interested to hear others input on this subject as well.