Last Updated on December 16, 2024 by Ewen Finser
If you have a retail store presence and are looking for good wholesale suppliers to get started with, it’s not an easy landscape to navigate.
Striking up local deals can work, but then you are often dealing with unreliable individual suppliers and having to manage multiple relationships. Bulletin is the type of resource that makes things easier for resellers, but it’s not without issues.
Specifically, I found Bulletin’s selection to be fairly limited for most retail setups. When they do have a product that fits what you can move, it’s a great process, but I’d be hard pressed to stand up full inventory just from Bulletin.
Finding some alternatives, backups, or just additional wholesale marketplaces is probably necessary.
Here’s my criteria for identifying a good wholesale marketplace:
- Product diversity and depth. Bulletin is fairly wide, but not very deep in certain categories, for example.
- Pricing and discounts. Some wholesale marketplaces don’t leave much markup room for retailers. This is one of the first things I look at. I also like to see meaningful discounts for bulk orders.
- Reasonable shipping times. A good wholesale marketplace facilitates timely shipping (ideally less than 1-2 weeks) so that your precious capital (business oxygen) doesn’t get tied up in the supply chain somewhere.
- Service fees. Most marketplaces charge some sort of fee (but not all). This is one on of the first things I dig into, even if the unit economics initially seem good (they can kill you on fees).
- Vendor relationship durability. Put simply, having some nice products in limited quantities or without long term relationships can be incredibly taxing on a small retail location. Some mixing of products is necessary, but if your main marketplace supplier is constantly out of your top selling items… that’s an issue.
With this in mind, I wanted to highlight some of the top Bulletin alternatives that I’ve been able to find.
Faire: Best Overall
Quick Summary: Faire is – by far – my favorite go-to wholesale marketplace for their breadth and depth of unique product selection across all ecommerce verticals. To put it simply, I typically START with Faire for any sourcing effort.
Why I Like Faire
- Easy to Use: Wholesaling is traditionally a very antiquated process. Some distributors have ancient or bespoke portals that feel “early internet” to say the least. The first time I used Faire it was a complete breath of fresh air. It’s well organized, navigable and a fully modern “shopping” experience.
- Transparent: I like that when I add products to my cart I can easily see the the break points (for bulk pricing discount minimums) and shipping costs. What you see is what you pay.
- Simplified Billing: As much as I love some of the brands I work with, navigating custom systems and processes for each can be a huge time sync. Working on Faire, I have piece of mind that the process works and I don’t have to manage dozens of relationships. All other features aside, there’s something to be said for this.
- Unique Brands: While Faire isn’t immune to the Alibaba-effect (lower effort dupes), I was surprised at how many genuine “craft brands” are on the platform. Many products I haven’t been able to source elsewhere, even in product categories I’ve worked with for a while. IMO, this is one of the real breakout features for Faire. They seem to have cracked the network effect with their two-sided marketplace.
- Excellent Product Discovery: Faire is like the Amazon.com for wholesale vendors. If I’m looking to get the lay of the land in a particular market vertical, Faire gives me a great high-level overview of what’s out there AND some great product ideas that I may not have thought of.
Read More: Faire vs Bulletin compared directly.
Orderchamp: Best Dropshipping Options
Quick Summary: Orderchamp is similar in some ways to Faire (but with less selection) and built-in dropshipping integrations with Shopify for lower-risk supply chain management.
Why I Like Orderchamp
- Dropshipping Support: While dropshipping isn’t my primary model, it’s helpful to have in the back pocket, especially for validating product sell thru before making larger wholesale purchases (with better margins). Orderchamp is set up to integrate with Shopify, WooCommerce, and ChannelEngine, among others.
- Unique Curated Brands: While not as deep as Faire, Orderchamp does have some excecllent curated brands that you won’t necessarily find elsewhere (7,000+ as of this writing, with 1,300,000+ products total). As an EU-based startup, they also tend to have more European brands and trending product lines represented, which can make them a good additional option from your typical wholesale variety.
- Not Sold on Amazon: They publicly push the fact that their brands are not sold on Amazon. This is both an advantage for independent local retailers AND online stores looking to stand out with unique inventory (that doesn’t necessarily have to compete on price with Amazon).
- Organic & Eco Friendly Selection: Many of the brands listed on Orderchamp or Organic and/or eco-friendly, with various certifications and sourcing details to please discerning customers and educated audiences.
RangeMe: Best for Name Brands
Quick Summary: RangeMe has a solid niche as a product discovery and supplier platform for more recognizable brands and traditional wholesale partnerships.
Why I Like RangeMe
- Strong Grocery Selection: This isn’t a category I sell in, but what I hear from those that do is that RangeMe is particularly strong in the grocery category for finding wholesale suppliers.
- Industry Gatekeeper: For many brands looking to get picked up by big retailers like Costco, BJs, Walmart, etc… getting vetted and setup on RangeMe is often an important first step. What’s good for them, is often good for you as a retailer.
- Standardized Vetting: RangeMe is free for retailers, but has a freemium to premium model for brands. This means for smaller retailers or sellers looking for brands, what you see on RangeMe is often a good deal above fly by night and precarious brands.
- Matching: While RnageMe still resembles a marketplace in many ways, it’s become more of a matchmaker of sorts. This isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, but I’ve found it helpful to have this kind of sourcing in play versus just a grab bag of marketplace diving and filtering.
Powered by People
Quick Summary: Powered by People is a sustainable-first marketplace for wholesale craft brands that also features dropshipping.
Why I Like Powered by People
- Exclusively Sustainable: If you sell into the sustainable marketing niches, I find it super helpful to have an entire platform dedicated to these vetted craft products. Other generalist wholesale platforms DO have some sustainable brands, it’s just hard to differentiate and an extra diligence step. Not so for Powered by People!
- Dropship Capability: They can dropship any of their products and ship from their landed location within 48 hours. I still haven’t seen any app integrations, but I suspect a Shopify or BigCommerce one could be on the horizon.
- No Minimums: I had to do a double take when I read this. Many platforms are lowering minimums, but few are truly NO mins. Orders over $250 ship free, so that’s generally a hurdle I shoot for.
- International Footprint: You can find some truly unique gems from around the world, perfect for a global sustainable mission.
Creaote
Quick Summary: Creoate is another marketplace with a large selection of international merchandise.
Why I Like Creaote
- Many Smaller Brands: Because Creaote makes it very easy for brands or makers to list their products, this means a broader selection of more obscure (in a good way) products that you can discover and source for a more unique product mix.
- Free Global Shipping: As UK-based platform, you might expect shipping to be a friction point, but they make it free if you meet their minimums (currently 300 Euros as of this writing).
- Good Product Mix: Creaote is closer to a Faire in terms of overall vibe and product categories, but with a more European aesthetic.
- Health & Wellness Depth: From my anecdotal research, it looks like beauty and wellness products which is a key edge compared to many other platforms.
FashionGo: Best for Fashion
Quick Summary: Like Bulletin, but dedicated to wholesale fashion brands, with the latest trends from Asia and more.
Why I Like FashionGo
- Fashion Focused: Fashion can be such a fickle market with unique challenges. It makes sense to sometimes go with a dedicated platform like FashionGo to cut right to the chase. And this is really the primary benefit for retailers with a strong (or all) fashion-related product mix.
- Product Range: Within the fashion category, FashionGo has an impressive range. MUCH broader than Bulletin’s fashion selection and even many of the alternatives I’ve suggested above.
- Shopify Dropshipping App: FashionGo has a popular Shopify app that I like as a first step towards validating customer demand. Once I start to see regular dropship orders, I can then order in bulk wholesale to get better margins.
Final Take: Which One to Start With?
As you can see, there are some great options for retailers to choose from. If you need to narrow it down a bit, here’s how I’d generally approach my test orders:
- Start with Faire. They have the widest selections across all product categories and provide the most seamless experience with flexible minimum orders and solid bulk discounts.
- Then explore… RangeMe has higher minimums, so maybe safe that until you are really dialed in on product selection, but otherwise Orderchamp and the others listed are worth small minimum orders to test.
Of course, for specialty grocery or fashion applications, both FashionGo and Mable are obvious places to start.