How to Find a Supplier to Source Your Product

At Jungle Scout, we’re all too familiar with the overwhelming process that is supplier research.

You first go through the long process of finding the perfect product, and then you have to go through the same exhaustive research to find a supplier!

It doesn’t matter if you have the best product idea of the century; if you can’t find a reputable supplier to manufacture a high-quality product, you’ll never be able to launch. 

While both Alibaba and Global Sources are reliable ways to find suppliers and manufacturers for your private label products, you may be missing out on other high-quality manufacturers not listed on these marketplaces. 

That’s where the Supplier Database comes in — a database of vetted suppliers is built right into our software, which means you can source your supplier through your Jungle Scout account.

In this article, we’ll go over Jungle Scout’s Supplier Database tool, how to use it, and how it’ll take your supplier research to the next level.

What is Supplier Database?

Supplier Database is a first-of-its-kind feature among Amazon selling tools that helps sellers find legitimate product supplies from across the globe. To find verified suppliers, you can search by product, company name, supplier name, or by ASIN. 

If you are wondering what supplier your competitors use or a top brand uses, you can enter the company name or ASIN within Supplier Database.

How to use Supplier Database

What’s the most important aspect of finding a reliable product supplier? Making sure their business is legitimate.

With Supplier Database, not only can you find the perfect supplier for your business, but the tool also makes verification easy by extracting and displaying real shipping data from U.S. customs.

Plus, only suppliers with verified shipments imported into the U.S. will appear in the database — so you’ll know if they’re legitimate or not.

Keep reading to learn how to use Supplier Database for your Amazon business.

As you can see, Supplier Database offers four types of searches:

1. Search by product. I entered my product idea in this search field.
2. Search by company. To find the suppliers my competitor uses, I entered their full legal name in here.
3. Search by supplier. If I’d had a manufacturer in mind, I would have entered their full factory name here.
4. Search by ASIN. Enter your competitor’s ASIN here.

This allows anyone to search for suppliers, whether you have a ton of information about a manufacturer, or none at all.

How to find a supplier: Product search

Finding a supplier using the product search option was as simple as in your product idea. For this example, I will enter the keyword “snow sled” into the search bar.

If you’re not getting the results you hoped for, enter different variations of your keyword, get more specific or more broad, until you find the right supplier.

This is a good method to use if you’re unsure of what you’re looking for as it will bring up a list of suppliers that may only be vaguely related to your product idea.

The top two results were a 94% and 93% match to my keyword, respectively, so that is a great start.

At this point, I had two options:

1. Save suppliers to a list under the “Supplier Tracker” tab in my Jungle Scout account;
2. Search for the suppliers’ contact information.

If you want to create a list of qualified suppliers to choose from, it makes sense to save them to “Supplier Trackers.”

This allows users to create separate lists of manufacturers, which works really well if you’re researching different suppliers for different kinds of products.

After if you find your supplier, you’ll want to search for their contact info. Thankfully, Supplier Database makes that simple too.

Just click on the “Search for Contact Info”button at the top, right-hand corner of the screen and a new page will open with Google search results based on that supplier’s information.

How to find a supplier: Company search

Searching for suppliers by company is a little trickier, and this is where Jungle Scout’s Extension comes in handy.

To look up the suppliers your competitors are using, just use the ‘Brand’ results from your Amazon/Extension product searches.

Now, going back to our original search, I used the names from the Brand column and plugged them into the database one by one to view the results.

Before I go any further, it’s important to note that the majority of brands will fall under a separate company entity.

Luckily, our Supplier Database was designed to suggest the company name you’re looking for, when possible.

Example:

I searched for the brand name “SportsStuff” in the Supplier Database but did not get any results. Instead, the tool suggested a company that brand is likely owned by:

To view the types of products a specific manufacturer is shipping, remember to click on “View More” under the supplier information.

By clicking on each one of the top suppliers, I pulled up the list of products they had shipped previously.

 

Now I’m getting somewhere!

The next step is to take a closer look at the operations for each of the suppliers on the list from Supplier Database.

You can do this on Alibaba, viewing the products they are producing and the materials they are using.

You can also utilize Supplier Database’s in-app search I mentioned earlier. The contact info button will take you right to Google for the company’s details.

How to find a supplier: Supplier search

This search method is recommended if you’ve been researching suppliers on Alibaba.com (or anywhere else on the internet).

Alibaba may offer buyer protection policies and Trade Assurance as extra precautions, but it doesn’t provide the kind of data Supplier Database does to confirm the legitimacy of a supplier’s claims.

And when you’re handing over your life savings to invest in a product, you need to know that your manufacturer has a proven history of successful shipments with satisfied sellers.

So let’s say you found a supplier through other channels, started negotiations, and are ready to place your first order.

You feel like communication with the supplier is going well. They seem reliable and fair. Plus, their sample was great and they are agreeable to your business terms.

Before you make any decisions, though, verify the company with Supplier Database.

This is the time to search for that supplier specifically, to confirm the legitimacy of their business. Check out their shipment history and, if necessary, validate the details with the supplier.

This is your business, and building a completely transparent relationship with your supplier must be a priority.

Alternatively, let’s say you’ve been working with a supplier and selling your product for some time. Everything is going well, so you haven’t considered renegotiating the original terms of your contract.

In this case, comparing notes with your competitors could be beneficial financially.

Maybe your supplier quoted your minimum order quantity (MOQ) at 500, but Jungle Scout’s Supplier Database shows they’ve shipped far less for other companies.

Or you might discover your biggest competitor is using the same supplier — using Supplier Database can help you verify all of this important information. 

How to find a supplier: ASIN search

The last method you can use to find a reliable supplier is by searching for an ASIN that is related to the product you want to launch. After doing your product research, you should have a good idea of who your main competitors are. 

Copy and paste your competitors ASINs one by one into Supplier Database to find the shipping data of the company associated with that ASIN.

Next steps

So even if you just need to confirm your suppliers’ shipment history, Supplier Database is an added layer of security for your business.

And now that you’ve organized and verified your list of potential suppliers And now that you’ve organized and verified your list of potential suppliers, download our free How to Sell on Amazon for Beginners 2023 Guide to learn how to conduct supplier outreach and communicate with potential business partners.

Do you have any more questions regarding sourcing products or using Supplier Database?

Want to start using Jungle Scout and Supplier Database to launch, grow, and run your Amazon business? Click the “Learn More” button below!