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Re: Need urgent advice in marketing . Sep 15, 2008 10:50 AM
Welcome to the community. It sounds like you are being compelled to order 5 containers to get more favorable pricing from your supplier, so you end up with one container you can retail quickly and four you have to hold in storage that eat up your profit. Is that the problem?
Wholesaling (instead of warehousing) the additional containers is the option you're asking about. The issue might be the cost of reshipping those containers (or the 300-400 units in them that you referred to). If you pay transportation, insurance, etc., to send them from you to a buyer, it could cost you more than warehousing. If the buyer pays for that, it could eat up his/her potential profit (plus, if the buyer could handle that many units, why wouldn't he/she just buy direct from the supplier like you do?). Also, if you're importing those tables, wholesaling a load of them will likely cut into your retail sales.
One option to consider would be a change in pricing. If "everything was OK" when you were ordering one container, and if you had retail backorders when you were operating that way, it suggests that your margin was satisfactory and that demand exceeded supply. So why not keep ordering one container, only increase the price to cover whatever additional the supplier is charging you for the smaller quantity order? Consumer demand may decrease slightly, but you have backorders now, and your unit margin will increase to offset the decline -- plus it would seemingly improve your inventory control and customer fulfillment, too.
Another option (if the numbers won't work for a price change) would be to form a partnership with whoever you were thinking you'd sell all those units to wholesale -- and then get together to buy collectively as one entity. You'd each get the advantage of quantity pricing, only pay for shipping once on the portion of the units you were receiving, and only receive the number you could handle in your existing retail space.
I hope that helps some (or stimulates another idea that does). Good luck.