say i want to buy around 100 lights.do you know a ppalce that will sell them to me ata great discount for wholesale prices?
I would imagine many manufacturers would give you a very good price on 100 lights.
Yeah so far i only got like 25 percent off. i want to buy them to resell and there isnt enough difriece in cost to make money. id love 50 percent off or more
China.
Sorry. 0:)
O i want to got there so bad awesume looking women and lots of gadgets and great people
You have to understand, to these Chinese manufacturers 100 lights is barely a drop in the bucket. If you look at the Alibaba website many of these manufacturers require minimum orders of 1000 to get a wholesaler break. To get the real discounts you’ll need to order in the 10,000 unit range.
1000 is no problem if the price is right .i just want to make money and sell great lights.but i figure 100 would be so we can build trust between us.it is scary to send that kinda money to some one
With 100 you can start the business, but to get 50% discount you need a lot more to order.
I haven’t worked with flashlights but I do know my old boss used to deal with electronic gadgets with dealers in China. Depending on the light 1000 units ought to get you to the minimum order which doesn’t really afford you any better discount. If you look on sites like Alibaba and they have a discount price range from say $4 per light to a max of $10 a light. They also state minimum order and supply ability. So take those as approximately what it would take to get the discount. If you want those lights at $4 each you’ll need to order the maximum supply ability, often times in the 10,000 units per month, if you order the minimum you pay $10 per light. There’s also the manufacturers lead time. Once you order 10,000 units, you have to wait at least a month for them to ramp up and start producing. Then you’ve got to deal with customs and especially US customs. Commercial freight in the US from China is known to be held up for weeks to months at a time.
On top of this the Chinese work a little differently. When you start a commercial account you are now responsible for shipping. They have a funny thing called freight on board. Basically it means they’ll deliver it in a box to the nearest shipping center, from there you pay everything else, all shipping, handling, taxes and imports fees from your country. I think getting a 25% discount and included shipping probably covers you beyond the minimum order and the associated fees of trying to go with a commercial account.
1000 might get you enough of a discount to justify the commercial account if that’s their minimum order. I’m just saying you can’t get get the big discount without a big investment.
@Mr_Krabs: GREAT post with a lotta’ info for the OP… I learned a bunch too… thanks
i am starting to just get scared.maybe to much of a project to take on right now .BUt i love flashlights and id love to sell them
This proposition looks a lot like trying to make money in auto racing.
There is an old saying “You can make a Small Fortune in Auto Racing if you start out with a Large Fortune”
Run, don’t walk away from this idea.
You can thank me later:)
You should do what many people here do, don’t try to swim with the sharks, swim with the little fishes. It wouldn’t be too bad to order bulk retail from one of the big sites and then learn to do quality work and custom jobs.
For example there are few suppliers of true 365 nm UV led flashlights. I’ve built my own using a cheap host, LedEngin 365 nm led light, and working with a local stained glass shop cutting woods glass UV filters, and showing it to engineers I got several orders. They found them extremely useful for inspection because nobody sells truly portable high spot intensity UV led flashlights. The nearest you can really find online costs $300+ and none of them filter out the visible light leakage of true 365nm led flashlights. Mine did and I sold them for $200 and everyone’s happy.
You could do the same but on a less technical scale. For example you can buy C8 pills from DX and simply upgrade them and sell them. You can for example get liquid epoxy and a syringe and pot the electronics and on top of that you can bond the led with good thermal epoxy. Thus you now have a value added product for inexpensive that you can sell for a premium as an upgrade to everyone who has the ever popular C8 flashlight. Or you could learn to solder and provide custom drivers for your pills for different modes because the number one complaint from people who live with Chinese flashlights is hating the 5 modes that Chinese love to put in. So if you can set your business model on inexpensive upgrades you’ll be providing a service where there currently is none and your profit margins will be better.
That’s how all successful businesses start. Nobody but the very wealthy can simply jump in and undercut the big boys.
You’d be better off buying quality hosts, components, batteries, chargers and doing custom mods to the lights and selling them to non-flashaholics. In my line of work, the streamlight stinger has been the go to light on our equipment belt. Pretty sad when a ten dollar light off eBay can blow a $120 stinger away but its old technology. I’ve been buying solarforce l2’s and modifying them with good drivers and led’s. I’ve sold them with a pair of tf 18650 flames and xtar mp1 charger for 60 bucks. It takes the guess work out of the equation for the people who don’t know what they are buying and they are left with a light that outperforms the high dollar stuff for half the price. Of course I’m only making $15 dollars a sale so if it takes 2 hours of my time per light then I’m better off moonlighting at McDonald’s.