Episode 7: How to find products for your eCommerce store

Episode Transcript: In this episode of The Business of eCommerce, I talk about how to source products. This is The Business of eCommerce, episode seven. Welcome to The Business of eCommerce, the podcast that helps eCommerce retailers start, launch and grow their eCommerce business. I'm your host, Charles Palleschi. I'm here to share some strategies to help you grow eCommerce business. So first, some housekeeping about this week. So just some updates on what's been going on on a personal note, my wife actually just gave birth to our second child, a little girl so we're very excited about that. Last week, I had produced the episode earlier so kind of getting back into it now and just very excited to be back. It's great to spend some time family and now it's great being back in the office. So just excited for that. On a professional update, as you probably know, I'm the founder of Spark Shipping. We tried an update last week. What we're trying to do is we've had a free trial, seven-day trial. We've always gone back and forth on is it something that made sense of our customers, for the business? This week, we made the decision to remove the free trial. We're going to be trying that for a while, see how that goes. What we found there is that a lot of folks, they are most successful when we help them initially, when they talk to us, when we are in the process of onboarding them, that sort of thing. The issue with the free trial is when users are doing that, they tend to sign up, try to get it set up themselves, but if they run into any roadblocks, they may or may not reach out. If they don't reach out and if we don't talk to them, they tend to have some issues and usually just kind of cancel within the first seven days. So we've originally started without the trial. We went through a trial. We switched back and forth over time. Right now, this week, we're trying to do without the trial. Let's see how that goes. We'll provide a lot more personal onboarding so we're excited to see that and try that. Also an update about the podcast, we are in the process right now of booking some guests. No formal announcements yet but we have several folks that we're talking to about doing some shows in the upcoming weeks, different eCommerce experts that can share some of their experiences. Also, other eCommerce retailers, I think that would be super helpful to have some folks, just to hear from other retailers who have done similar things, have grown their business, scaled their business and kind of see what's worked for them. I think it would be helpful for some retailers listening just to hear some other folks kind of in their circle. So super excited to get some guests on here and start talking to some subject matter experts. So if you also have any recommendations, anyone you would like, any topics like that, feel free to reach out. I'm always very available. I'm just very open to hearing any feedback, anything like that. So definitely feel free to share that with me. So jumping right into this week's topic. I'd like to talk about how to source products. So this is something that we get a lot when folks are just starting off. They may want to start an eCommerce business. They start looking at what products, what should they sell and how to actually get in touch with the right people to actually be able to provide those products and to sell those products in retail. So it's something that at the beginning it's very confusing and it's not very obvious. There's a lot of companies out there who kind of show themselves as ways of getting products. Some of these companies you have to actually pay them a subscription to have access to their products. That is not something I'd really recommend. Maybe it's okay to start but it's just in the longterm, you want to work with proper manufacturers, distributors, that sort of thing. So how to do this? First step is you have to get started by picking a niche,