any small business owners/entrepreneurs or anyone knowledgable on business..

**drake25** · 06-12-2012, 07:04 PM

ok so im having a difficult time understanding the distributor/ mass retail outlet relationship

i understand their individual roles, but the one thing that i cannot find online anywhere is this..

so you can sell your product to distributors, who in turn mark up the price and sell it to retail outlets, i get that. that makes sense, they take care of all logistics. but what i dont get is that they dont do the actual selling for you, thats your job. well how would you get your products into retail stores if you dont have an account with them? this makes no sense

so my question is, if your going to use distribution channels to get your product into retail stores, how do you get the retail stores to purchase your product/s via the distributors.

**gixxerboy1** · 06-12-2012, 07:07 PM

You have to get with the purchaser and pitch your products

the only companies that i know that use distributors are pretty large and usually the products are coming from overseas

**kif** · 06-12-2012, 07:13 PM

Yes sir, you need to become a salesman.

**kif** · 06-12-2012, 07:17 PM

I seen a documentary on Walmart once, 2 weeks every year they hold a seminar where thousands of people go to pitch there products to be sold in there stores. Not sure what your product is but you may have a better chance getting your foot in the door with a bunch of mom and pop stores first to build up some revenue.

**SEOINAGE** · 06-13-2012, 06:51 AM

Originally Posted by kif

I seen a documentary on Walmart once, 2 weeks every year they hold a seminar where thousands of people go to pitch there products to be sold in there stores. Not sure what your product is but you may have a better chance getting your foot in the door with a bunch of mom and pop stores first to build up some revenue.

Then they beat you around and set your prices. But it might be worth it.

**BIGB** · 06-13-2012, 08:00 AM

Lots of company's pay distributors to act like salesman what they do is go to external businesses and sell your product at a profit via a percentage of total product sold, they never have the product on hand but have it at the main company's warehouse, which then when sold gets shipped to the location the distributor takes a cut. This is how it works for some oil products anyways, not sure about retail that is a pain in the ass.