Wholesale Trade or Wholesaling is selling goods to commercial entities, who purchase these goods for reselling. The buyers are not the end users of the goods, they purchase them with the aim of reselling. For this reason, buyers can only be commercial entities. They might be retailers or other wholesalers.
The wholesale trade or wholesaling is an intermediate process in the distribution of goods. Wholesalers sell goods to other businesses and usually operate from a warehouse or office. These warehouses and offices usually have little or no display of the goods that they sell. They do not intend to have walk-in traffic as retailers do. Wholesalers do not normally use advertising directed to the general public, their customers are not the end-users of the products, but other intermediary commercial entities, like retailers or other wholesalers.
Wholesalers find and initially reached their customers by telephone, in-person marketing, or by specialized advertising that may include the Internet and other electronic means. Follow-up orders are either vendor-initiated or client-initiated, generally based on previous sales, and typically exhibit strong ties between sellers and buyers. In fact, transactions are often conducted between wholesalers and clients that have long-standing business relationships.
Although the perception is that wholesale involves buying and selling large quantities of goods, so-called bulk purchase, it is not necessarily always the case. Wholesale of some large non-durable goods may involve the purchase and sale of a single unit, for example, industrial machinery, aircraft, farm equipment, and others. Similarly, a wholesale order may include a number of various goods traded in single units each.
