As a consumer, the best way is to buy on line.

If you have a great little local bead store that offers a nice environment, great service and beads, it may not be there for long if you buy on line. If you want it to thrive, grow, and be there for years of enjoyment, you have to spend your money there. If you don’t, it won’t have great prices, it wont have a great selection, it can’t offer great classes and it will close.

Providing a beads store is a very expensive venture. It is even harder if the beads store’s wholesaler is competing with them for their customers. What does this mean? A bead store buys its product from a company that stocks lots of beads to sell in large quantity at lower prices to bead stores. This place, in general terms, is called a wholesaler. The beads store sells the product at smaller quantities to consumers at slightly higher prices. This higher price buys you, the customer, a nice store to shop in and it pays the salaries of the people who own the store and work there. The wholesaler has a warehouse and does not offer great classes and a great place to shop and congregate. Most likely the wholesaler does not pay tax in your town and does not support your town with jobs for the people who live there.

What has happened is that the large “wholesalers” and catalog stores with the help of the internet have decided to sell directly to their retailer’s customers bypassing the retailers (local beads stores). Yes, you may get a better price for a few beads, but you and your community lose in every other way. When you want to take a bead class or see some beads in person or get some personal help, the wholesaler will not be there for you and there will be no store in your town either. When you want a summer job for yourself or your children, that local store will not be there. When there are only big box retailers and alot of empty store fronts in your town, the wholesaler will not be there for you.

Places who have great beads stores support these stores. The only way to have a great store store is to support it. Don’t buy from on line retailers, buy at your local beads store or from a local beads store like The Beadcage. If your local store does not have what you need, have them get it and then buy it. It may be a bit more expensive, but in time prices will come down. Take classes at the store. Teach at the store. Tell friends about the store. Spend time posting positive constructive comments about your store on blogs and rating services on line so others will know about it. Don’t bad mouth a local store, work with them constructively to help them improve.

Remember having a lemonade stand as a child and watching cars go by and no one stops? As a child it is a pretty bad feeling. This is the same feeling a bead store has when people drive by and buy from an on line “wholesaler”.

The way I look at it is there is a manufacturer, a middle man, a retailer and a customer. This is the typical supply chain. A manufacturer sells in high quantity to a wholesaler at the lowest price. The wholesaler then sells smaller quantities of the product purchased from a manufacturer to many retailers at a slightly higher price. The retailer buys small quantities from several wholesalers at a slightly higher price than the wholesaler purchase from the manufacturer. The retailer then sells the goods he purchased from wholesalers at even smaller quantities to retail customers for a slightly higher price than he purchased the goods from the wholesaler for.

This is about the simplest chain of events for getting goods from the manufacturer to the consumer. The problem is that often times there are more than just two people between the manufacturer and the consumer. Sometimes product goes through several hands before they reach the consumer. In my example there is only one person receiving wholesale pricing, the wholesaler.

So, the wholesaler receives wholesale pricing of goods from the manufacturer. The wholesaler then offers retailer pricing, slightly higher, to the retailers. Then the retailers offer consumer pricing to the consumers.

If a bead store offers you wholesale pricing, the way I look at it, they must be the manufacturers. The “wholesale” price they offer you really depends on how many hands the goods have been through before you purchase. So what you as the end consumer are actually getting is a bulk or quantity or sale price.

For every product, we try to buy the goods directly from the manufacturer. Our customers then realize true wholesaler pricing, the same that a retail store may be offered. Because we limit the number of hands our goods pass through, we can offer our customers better pricing and even better bulk, discount and sale pricing. We are able to buy better product as better product costs us less.

I can’t say that we have the best prices all the time, but there is a good chance we have great prices. I can say that with much of our product the goods come directly from the manufacturer to our store. You are next on the supply chain.

So the next time you are offered wholesale pricing, if they will tell you, ask if they buy directly from the person who made the product. If not, you are getting a bulk or discount to the consumer price. Wholesale pricing has become a tricky way of telling customers they will get a small discount if they buy more.