discover How to Get Your Products into the Big Box Retailers like Costco, Home Depot or Wal-Mart Supplier:
Many small businesses view getting their products onto the shelves of big box retailers such as Wal-Mart as winning retail Olympic gold. Besides dramatically increasing a business’s profits and opening doors to other lucrative retail contracts, having your products on a big box retailer’s shelves gives consumers and other retailers the message that your company’s products are winners.
However, competition is fierce; in 2004, “about 10,000 new suppliers applied to become Wal-Mart vendors. Of those, only about 200, or 2%, were ultimately accepted” (Gwendolyn Bounds, “The Long Road to Wal-Mart Shelves”,The Wall Street Journal Online).
So how can your company be one of those few companies? The first thing you have to do is ensure that your product and your company will be attractive to a big box retailer.
Preparing to Get Your Products into a Big Box Retailer
Big box retailers are looking for companies that:
1. Have a solid track record.
Big box retailers such as Wal-Mart don’t want to bother with the untried and unproven.
For one thing, there are so many businesses competing to be suppliers that they don’t have to.
For another, “Wal-Mart doesn’t like to account for more than 30% of a supplier’s total business; if it did, and suddenly had to change an order based on shifting trends, it could sink the supplier,” says Gwendolyn Bounds in “The Long Road to Wal-Mart Shelves”). So having other retail accounts increases your chances of getting the big box retail account.
2. Have a unique product.
That’s the kind of product that big box buyers are looking for. Remember, in so many product categories there’s so much duplication that there’s absolutely no incentive for a big box buyer to commit to carrying another one. The ideal product is something different – that will still fit with the retailer’s current product lines. read more at http://sbinfocanada.about.com/od/marketing/a/bigboxretail.htm
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