How do you find decent wholesale suppliers? This would have to be one of the most common questions I get asked.

When you first start out, it might seem like all the genuine suppliers of wholesale merchandise are hiding under rocks (50 ton boulders to be exact) making them virtually impossible to find, but it really isn't that hard if you know where to start. The more you look for them, the better your searching skills will become, so in the next few paragraphs I'm going to cover some of the methods you can use to find wholesalers for your business.

1. Search engines - Yes, but I've already tried searching for bulk wholesale products in the search engines and all I've come up with is a 967,000 irrelevant results I hear you say.

There's a technique you can use to help make sure you only receive relevant results in your search, dramatically increasing your chances of success. When searching for clothing wholesalers for example, many people will expect suitable wholesale suppliers to come up from just the 2 words typed in as is, like clothing wholesaler, but that won't happen. The search engine will just bring up any website that contains the words clothing and wholesaler, but not necessarily together giving you thousands of sites talking about everything from the history of clothing, to wholesalers for ice for the Eskimos!

You need to enclose your search terms in double quotes to make sure your search results only give you the exact information you're looking for. For example, if you're using wholesaler bulk clothes as your search phrase, you need to type it in as "wholesale bulk clothes" to receive more relevant results.

2. Yellow Pages - It may seem like an obvious place to look, but believe it or not, many people seem to forget about the Yellow Pages phone book. Not all wholesalers bother with listings in there, but a reasonable amount do so it's well worth a look.

Type in the word wholesalers in the search box at the top of their site and they'll bring up a list of various wholesalers categories they have. The Australian Yellow Pages can be found at http://www.yellowpages.com.au.

3. Contact the manufacturers - This can be a particularly effective method if you're looking for certain brand name merchandise. The manufacturers are the ones that make the product and sell it in bulk lots to the wholesale suppliers. The wholesalers then turn around and sell the product in smaller lots to retailers who want to buy wholesale merchandise.

In most cases you won't be able to buy directly from the manufacturer, but they should be quite happy to tell you who their authorised wholesalers are. After all, if they tell you where to buy their products, then ultimately they're making more money!

4. Free online directories - There are numerous free online wholesaler directories you can browse through on the net containing anywhere from 50 to 50,000 listings. Depending on what type of products you're looking for, you might be able to find a couple of suitable wholesalers, but it can sometimes take a bit of work wading through listings that may be out of date, not genuine wholesalers or wholesale suppliers that aren't interested in selling to small businesses.

5. Paid online directories - Like the free directories, some are better than others and some contain more wholesalers than others. The good ones are a huge time saver and can save you many hours searching, but the bad ones (those that are nothing more than a copy of listings from DMOZ or the Yellow Pages) are nothing more than a waste of money.

Good directories will be regularly updated, have a large range of wholesale suppliers that sell to small business, not just big department stores and will be willing to source suppliers you need that aren't already in the site.

After going through the steps above, you have hopefully managed to find yourself at least a few good wholesalers. Out of the free methods, I have personally found searching online or contacting the manufacturers to be the most effective techniques to find some great new suppliers but the Yellow Pages and the free online directories are still worth looking at.