Joel Goldstein is the President of Mr. Checkout Distributors.
Selling your first product in a big box retailer is actually quite a simple process that most certainly does not need to be a stressful event. However, you need to make sure that you understand the process in its entirety in order to be successful. In this article, I will delve into how you can get your first product in a big box retailer with the utmost sense of ease and success.
First, you are going to need to make sure that your product has seen successful sales on a local level.
Achieving local success is crucial before making attempts to try and get your product into a big box retail store. When you are able to show potential retailers that your product has seen successful sales on a local level, they will be more apt to want to invest in your product and put it on their shelves.
Achieving this goal first is going to be one of the best tips to get your product noticed and into large retailers. The more time and effort you can put into ensuring that your product sees successful sales on a local level, the easier it will be to engage the attention of big box retailers and make them want to work with you.
Next, you want to find a distributor to work with—before you even go about speaking to the buyer.
When you work successfully with a distributor, you are able to lay out and organize all of the information needed to be able to provide to a potential buyer, including your profit margins. This is going to be your best bet in terms of being able to clearly and concisely provide them with all of the information they need to be able to analyze things on their end to make sure that the two of you—and your distributor—will all have a successful relationship.
Furthermore, when you know what your profit margins are, you can handle and prepare for potential fees that you may incur when it comes to working with a big box retailer, for instance, things like shelf space slotting fees.
Make sure that you also give the potential buyer multiple merchandising options so that they are able to properly analyze your product and determine where it will best fit in their store as well as how they can market it accordingly.
Some things that you may want to consider are offering various size options, packaging options and pricing options. Offering a few different options to the potential buyer gives them the opportunity to review your product options and consider which one(s) they may potentially want to pick up and put into their store.
If it works for you, you may want to consider a free-fill program in order to get your product into a big box retailer. This will even further enable all parties involved to see how the product is going to sell.
In a free-fill program, a supplier will provide the retailer (or a distributor) with some of their product for free in order to put it on the store’s shelves. While it may seem like you are taking a small bit of a financial hit, this is an excellent opportunity to provide some much-needed attention to your product and assist in boosting your sales.
If your free-fill product sells successfully in the retailer, they are going to be significantly more likely to actually keep purchasing your product.
Once you start the process of selling your first product to a big box retailer, you may want to consider the option of scan-based trading.
The traditional inventory stocking method for the vast majority of retailers is to purchase inventory directly from the supplier. Retailers will then compensate their cost outlay by selling those goods to the consumer. With the help of scan-based trading, retailers do not pay for the product until they actually sell them. The inventory is also managed via scan-based trading (owned by the supplier), and it also uses point-of-sale data, whereby the supplier then has the capability to generate an invoice which is then sent to the retailer.
There are a lot of ways that you can get your personal product into big box retailers, but you most certainly need to make sure that you take the time to do some research on who the best distributor is going to be to work with and then you can take the steps to get into retail stores. You also need to understand the process in its entirety in order to best anticipate the hoops you need to jump through—and which ones you can completely avoid—which will save you a tremendous amount of time, stress and effort in the long run.
It is of the utmost importance that you remain patient when it comes to getting your product into retailers.
Start small and start local, and then follow the process to get your product into a big box retailer. Be confident with your product and the fact that the consumer needs to give it a shot. The more confident you are about what you have to offer, the easier it will be to get the support you need to really see successful retail sales.
Forbes Business Development Council is an invitation-only community for sales and biz dev executives. Do I qualify?
Read the full article here
