This guide walks beginners through, with tips for sourcing wholesale items to sell and setting up your store today.

Imagine you could focus more of your efforts on product design and innovation, beautifying your brand, or streamlining operations instead of finding customers and worrying about sales.

Marketing doesn’t come naturally for all entrepreneurs, which can make sustaining and growing a business a struggle. Luckily, you can pass on some—or even all—of that responsibility to other businesses, by creating a wholesale channel.

How does wholesale work?

Wholesaling is the act of selling your products in bulk to another retailer, usually at a discount, who then sells the product to its customers at a higher price. It’s important to note that creating a wholesale channel for your online business does still allow you to sell your product to the end consumer.

As a wholesaler, you can sell to both consumers and other retailers. You don’t have to choose one or the other.

The first examples of wholesale businesses that might come to mind are probably large brick-and-mortar department stores, like Walmart or Target. Wholesale is, after all, often thought of as an old-fashioned business model that’s being disrupted by newer direct-to-consumer eCommerce businesses.