The business world is not kind to a small retailer looking to build their business. Even before COVID-19 gutted small businesses and their finances, it was never easy for a small retailer to engage in targeted marketing, look for their niche, find a cooperative wholesaler and indeed stay afloat whilst doing it. But wholesale platforms with a massive online aggregator store and offline units dotted around the country are helping these small retailers survive and grow on to prosper.
Facilities
If there’s something that wholesale platforms are fantastic at, it’s the facilities that they can offer that small retailers can use while setting up their businesses. With facilities such as photo templates, signup help and free customer support, wholesale platforms can be highly effective in helping these retailers make a running start. Further, a lot of wholesale platforms also offer product advice behind the scenes — they want their retailers to succeed, after all. This can be anything ranging from an informal bit of advice when putting the products up, to comprehensive monthly data sets that help the retailers make an informed decision about where the market is and where it’s going. This immediately removes the need to do a degree of market research and ensures that the small retailers can focus on finding the right products for their chosen niche, and then engage in targeted marketing to the customers in said niche.
Reachability
Keeping on to the topic of marketing, the sheer scale and reachability of some wholesale platforms is what gets many small retailers into the spotlight when they’re newly starting out. This not only means they don’t need to spend as much time (and money) doing marketing because they’re already on a platform that gets a lot of traffic, but also that their marketing can now be more tailored towards a niche now that they’re on an established platform. Away from the online and e-commerce sphere, it’s important to not forget the power that offline wholesale stores still have. This is especially true in such industries such as clothing, makeup and home decor — and any small retailer looking to make a dent in their market would always be keen on a degree of offline presence. It is incredibly difficult to do so when they’re just starting out, not least to the soaring real estate prices, thus a partnership with a wholesale platform may just be the next best thing. It’s never easy to acquire this partnership, but once established, they’ll have access to store space across the wholesaler’s operating region and thus have the chance to find their feet before embarking on their own journey, if they so choose.
