best buy and Walmart only work with old brands, but I can’t contact distributors in Europe, the United States or Japan. Do you have any suggestions? I tried emailing all the distributors I found on Google but there was no response from them.How early-stage companies should establish their own sales channels

  • Sol_Hando@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    Your best bet is to find an American or European firm who can put it on Amazon for you if you can’t yourself. Getting some Amazon reviews and some legitimacy from that, maybe even a sponsorship or two will go a long way in convincing larger chains to hold your product. Unfortunately that will require you to actually have the product designed and produced ahead of time, which is extremely expensive. If your product is innovative enough you might find an investor, but otherwise expect to from the cost yourself.

    I’m sure Walmart gets a thousand requests to stock someone’s product per day, but they are only interested in brands that can provide consistent quality for a cheap price that they are sure will sell. Going in dry without that legitimacy gives you zero chance.

      • Sol_Hando@alien.topB
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        10 months ago

        Are you the actual producer or at least exclusive distributor of this product? If so, and if you can produce at least a few hundred of them up front, it’s incredibly easy for any American to get it on American Amazon business account set up. I set one up years ago to sell something as a side hustle but a more serious startup I was building took off and I just didn’t have the time. I’m not sure about setting one up internationally, but I’m sure it would be much more complicated.

        Amazon even has a program where they will store and ship your items for a fee, which can streamline the process a whole lot depending on how confident you are they will sell. It costs money to store, but you only have to worry about shipping once to a central location, which is major if you’re based in Shenzhen like what your website suggests.

        Depending on your margins you may want to try contacting YouTubers who make computer builds and offer them a free monitor if they promote it. A video with a 100,000 views featuring your monitor would have to be worth the few hundred dollars it costs to produce.

        Any company that specializes in Amazon FBA will charge you big bucks to set it up though, which I wouldn’t recommend. If you’re based in China I would see if anyone in your firm went to school in the US, or perhaps still has someone they can trust to partner with.