Selling against Wal Mart

Anita Cambell of Small Business Trends reports that the biggest obstacle faced by small businesses is competing with Wal Mart. Our clients complain from time to time that Wal Mart (or another big box retailer) has picked up a product we've found for them. While it may be possible to beat their price, you won't beat it by enough to lure customers away from the convenience of buying everything in one place. How to survive in this environment then? Stay ahead of the big boys. Smaller importers are leaner and able to adapt more quickly than their enormous competitors. You must constantly source new and innovative products, keeping yourself out of the corporate superpowers' paths. And if you ever get big enough, you might be able to get one of your products into Wal Mart. The behometh retailer (and world's biggest conmpany) generally requires you to provide thousands of units up front and you can exepct it to take at least 3 months before you see any money at all. What's more, if your product experiences a defect rate of 20 percent or more (let's hope you are not dealing with this, but many Chinese products score much worse), you are almost guaranteed to lose money. Still, if you succeed in supplying Wal Mart, you will be raking in millions of dollars of income without any need for an expensive marketing effort.