Use Cases / Amazon Wholesale
Amazon Wholesale Sourcing
Amazon wholesale sourcing involves analyzing supplier price lists to identify profitable products for resale on Amazon.
What is Amazon Wholesale?
Amazon wholesale is a business model where sellers purchase products in bulk from authorized distributors and manufacturers at wholesale prices, then resell them on Amazon through the FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) program.
The typical flow is: supplier provides product catalog → seller analyzes for profitable items → bulk purchase at wholesale price → ship to Amazon FBA warehouse → Amazon handles storage, shipping, and customer service → seller earns the margin between wholesale cost and selling price minus Amazon fees.
Unlike private label (creating your own branded products) or retail arbitrage (buying discounted retail items), wholesale involves selling existing branded products that are already listed on Amazon. This means sellers are competing on existing product listings rather than creating new ones.
The Challenge
The main challenge in wholesale sourcing is efficiently evaluating supplier catalogs. Suppliers often send large price lists containing hundreds or thousands of products. For each product, the seller needs to determine:
- Does this product exist on Amazon?
- What is the current selling price?
- What are all the applicable Amazon fees?
- What profit margin would this product yield?
- How well does this product sell (sales rank)?
- Is there significant competition on the listing?
Manual evaluation of each product is time-consuming and impractical for large catalogs. This is why sellers commonly use wholesale list analysis tools to automate the evaluation process.
A Typical Workflow
Receive supplier price list
Suppliers provide CSV or Excel files containing product codes (EAN/UPC), product names, and wholesale prices.
Upload to a list analyzer
The file is uploaded to a wholesale list analysis tool that can process bulk product data.
Map product codes to ASINs
The tool converts EAN/UPC codes to Amazon ASINs to identify products on the Amazon marketplace.
Fetch current Amazon data
Current selling prices, FBA fees, and sales rank data are retrieved for each product.
Calculate profit per item
Profit is calculated for each product: selling price minus purchase cost minus all Amazon fees.
Review and select products
The seller reviews profitable items, considering factors like margin, sales rank, and competition.
How Profit-Scanner Addresses This
One example of a tool designed for this workflow is Profit-Scanner, which focuses on processing supplier CSV files and calculating estimated profit for each product.
The tool handles the workflow described above: accepting CSV or Excel uploads containing product codes and supplier prices, mapping those codes to Amazon ASINs, fetching current pricing and fee data, and calculating profit margins. Results can be filtered by profit amount, margin percentage, sales rank, and other criteria, then exported for further review or to share with team members.