Ever notice that much of the items for sale on eBay from online stores is not the greatest quality. I find that sellers who have "real" bricks-and-mortar stores have an easier time sourcing name brand products. Well, I recently found a company whose product I recently wanted to sell. There was only one company (person) selling their products on eBay. And doing a little bit of research showed that I should do well with their products. I went to their website and found their customer service e-mail address. I sent a short, but polite e-mail inquiring about being a reseller.
I got a nice response back. It was all as I expected, except that they only wanted to deal with retailers who have bricks-and-mortar stores. You will find this often because companies just don't want to deal with small online businesses.
Luckily, I have already set up a couple of things so that I can appear to be an "real" store. First, I set my company up as a corporation. Setting up an LLC is very simple. This gets me a Tax ID Number. Then I set up an 800 number that rings to my sell phone. My wife has a nice voice and I got her to record a business greeting on my cell phone's voice mailbox.
Because my home address has sort of a suburban sounding name (you know like Flowering Lane). I got a business mail box down at the local UPS Store. It costs $14 per month and provides me with that bricks-and-mortar address.
In the end, I was able to deal with the company and get their wholesalers catalog without any phone calls. It is a good deal. They will ship the wholesale merchandise to the UPS Store. They will even call me to tell me I have a large package. I pick it up on the way home from my day job, list the items on eBay, and I am in business with a quality product that many other eBay stores would have problems acquiring.
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