Ready-to-Sell Sourcing: Buying What Already Exists
- Updated
In November 2021 an engineer on Hacker News looked back on building a low-volume optical product years earlier. His team had tried buying surplus lenses and prisms, "practically free compared to new or custom stuff", and found that "the inability to standardize was ultimately more costly" than paying for parts made to order (Hacker News, 2021 (opens in a new tab)). Then they found a factory in India that made prisms at a fair price. The prisms arrived in "handmade pasteboard" boxes "with hand-lettered labels glued on" (same comment).
He wasn't writing about sourcing models, but he covered the whole of this one. Buying what already exists is fast and cheap until you need the second batch to match the first, and until you need the pack to work for your customer as well as for the factory. Ready-to-sell is a good model. This short page is about what you do and don't control when you choose it.
What The Model Is
You buy a product that already exists, with little or no change, and sell it as it is. Maybe a sticker or a swing tag. Maybe a different carton. Nothing about the product itself. It suits a fast launch, a product whose demand is already proven, and testing a market before you commit to anything bigger.
It's the simplest model there is, and we'd start most first-time sellers here. Use the simplest model that does the job, and only move up when the market tells you to.
What You Control, And What You Don't
| You can decide | You can't decide |
|---|---|
| Which product, from which seller | How it's made, or from what |
| How many, and when | Whether the next batch matches this one |
| The outer pack and the labels you add | What the seller changes without telling you |
| Whether to inspect before you pay | Who else sells the same item |
The right-hand column is the price of speed. You can live with all of it, as long as you check each batch rather than trusting the last one.
The Real Work
Four jobs make up this model, and the first two take most of the time.
Finding the seller. Ready goods are sold by makers with running stock, by traders and by wholesale markets. A trader is often the easiest route for small quantities, and a fine one, as long as you ask who made the goods. That answer decides whether you can prove origin at your border, which can decide your duty rate.
Judging quality on what exists. There's no development stage to fix things in. The goods are what they are, so your sample is your whole specification. Judge it hard, write down what you approved, and keep it. The sample evaluation checklist gives you a structure.
Packaging. Decide what the goods travel in and what your customer opens. Ask the seller to quote export cartons, inner packs and your labels separately, so you can see what each costs.
Logistics. Somebody has to export the goods. If your seller can't, you'll need an exporter of record, and SourcingSync (opens in a new tab) can act as one or find you one.
In India
Ready-to-sell from India runs through marketplaces, merchant exporters with stock and the wholesale markets, each with its own catch on provenance and paperwork. Those channels and their watch-outs are on ready-to-sell from India.
When To Move On
Stay with ready-to-sell while the product sells and the batches stay steady. Move to wholesale when the quantities grow, and to private label when you want your own brand on it. Most good businesses go through all three.
The engineer's prisms were good enough to rescue his project. They still came with hand-lettered labels. That's ready-to-sell in one image - the product you wanted, exactly as the maker makes it, and a little work left for you.