Adding new brands to your range: finding them is easy, evaluating them is the work

Short answer. Adding new brands to your range is not about finding, but about evaluating. Assess every brand on three axes: margin potential after all costs, reliability of the supplier, and fit with your existing range and channels. B2B platforms like Orderchamp, Ankorstore and Syncee deliver the brands. The calculation that decides whether a brand wins is yours to make.

Finding new brands is a solved problem. I open Orderchamp and see seven thousand brands. Ankorstore and Syncee add thousands more on top of that. The bottleneck is not on the supply side. It sits with the question of which brand you actually bring into your range, and why.

I am writing this for the operation that is already in place. Not the starter looking for a first supplier, but the established business that wants to grow and has the same question for every candidate: will this brand earn, or will it soon eat into margin, shelf space and attention?

Why expanding a range so often goes wrong

Most resellers add brands on gut feeling. A brand looks good on the platform, the purchase price seems sharp, and it fits your category. Three months later it sits idle on your shelf, or worse: it does sell, but the margin has evaporated after shipping, returns and channel costs.

That is not the result of a wrong choice. It is the result of no real evaluation. Finding feels like the work because it produces so many options. Evaluating is the work, and you skip it because it takes calculation.

Evaluating new brands on three axes

A brand worth the effort scores on three things at once. One or two is not enough.

Margin potential after all costs. Not the gross purchase margin shown on the platform, but what is left per channel. A brand that promises 45 percent gross can drop below your threshold on bol or Amazon after commission, shipping and the expected return rate. The margin that counts is the margin per product, per channel, after everything.

Reliability of the supplier. Delivery time, delivery reliability, stock stability and communication. A brand that sells well but delivers late or incomplete two out of three times costs you your rating on the channel and your customer trust. Ask for samples, ask about an API or feed connection, and watch how quickly and clearly they respond. That last point predicts the most.

Fit with your existing range. Does the brand reinforce what you already sell, or does it cannibalize it? Does it match your audience and your positioning, or does it pull your catalog apart? A brand that sits alongside your top sellers and lifts the average order value is worth more than a brand that hangs loose in the catalog.

Only when a candidate scores on all three axes does it belong in your range. The first two axes are calculation. The third is judgment, fed by your own sales data.

What B2B platforms do and do not do for you

Orderchamp, Ankorstore and Syncee are strong at what they were built for. Orderchamp connects retailers to thousands of brands with flexible payment terms and integrations with Shopify and WooCommerce. Ankorstore brings you distinctive, often local brands in interior, fashion and lifestyle. Syncee excels at automatic synchronization of stock and prices, so you do not have to import your product data manually (Orderchamp).

That is the finding side and the data side. What they do not do is your evaluation. None of these platforms knows your sales velocity per channel, your actual return rate, your channel commissions or your positioning. They show you the supply and the purchase price. The calculation that decides whether a brand wins for you sits beyond their reach, because it depends on your numbers, not theirs.

Audit your evaluation process before you automate it

Before I build anything, I look at how you decide today. With many resellers that is a habit that has grown over time: a gut feeling, a quick glance at the purchase margin, and go. Some steps you take now are ballast. Manually retyping product data from a platform while a feed or API delivers the same thing is work that can go. Recalculating margins in a loose spreadsheet that no one trusts anymore is a step that can be done smarter.

That is a deliberate step, not a reason to build nothing. I strip out what is redundant, so that what remains is the real evaluation, and that is what needs to be locked in.

Building the evaluation where off-the-shelf software stops

The three axes have to be calculated one way or another. The only question is whether that happens in your head and in loose spreadsheets, or in a system that runs along with you.

A standard inventory or purchasing package covers the happy path: one structured purchasing flow, stock and reorder moments. It does not cover your cost allocation per channel, your return rates per brand, or a scorecard that automatically runs a new candidate past your three axes. That is the build-or-buy line. A vendor sells its own catalog coverage, not your decision.

What I build is the evaluation layer on top. A brand from Orderchamp or Syncee comes in, the feed delivers price and stock, and my tooling immediately calculates the margin after all channel costs and your expected returns, puts the delivery reliability next to it, and tests the fit against your own sales data. No more gut feeling, but a scorecard that says: this brand wins on all three, or this brand fails on margin.

This has to be tracked and calculated one way or another. The only question is whether that cannot be done smarter today, with less manual work, than it is now. It can, and that is what I build.