Why No Minimum Orders Change the Math on Product Testing

The biggest risk in reselling isn’t picking the wrong product. It’s betting too much on it before you know it works.

Most traditional distribution deals come with a catch: before you can sell a product, you have to buy a lot of it. Minimum order quantities (MOQs) exist for good reasons on the supplier side — they reduce handling costs and guarantee volume. But for a reseller trying to test a new category, a new brand, or a new price point, MOQs create a problem. You’re forced to take inventory risk before you have any proof the product will sell.

This fundamentally changes what it means to “test” a product. Instead of a small, low-risk experiment, it becomes a committed bet. And if the product doesn’t move, you’re left eating the inventory.

The Real Cost of MOQs Isn’t Just the Inventory

When resellers talk about MOQs, the conversation usually centers on upfront cash. But the hidden cost is what MOQs do to your decision-making:

• They make you conservative. When a test requires a $2,000 or $5,000 commitment, you only test products you’re already fairly confident about. You stop experimenting.

• They slow you down. By the time you’ve sold through your MOQ and can evaluate results, weeks or months have passed. Trends move faster than inventory.

• They limit your breadth. Every dollar tied up in a minimum order is a dollar you can’t use to test something else.

The result is a reselling strategy built on caution rather than data — which is exactly backwards from how the best resellers operate.

What Product Testing Actually Looks Like Without MOQs

When you remove the minimum order requirement, product testing becomes what it should always have been: cheap, fast, and iterative.

Here’s a simple example. Say you’re a reseller focused on tech accessories. You’ve been selling USB hubs and cables well, and you’re curious whether smart home products — smart bulbs, security cameras — would resonate with your customer base.

With a traditional MOQ setup, testing that hypothesis means buying a minimum run of each product you want to try — potentially several thousand dollars before you’ve sold a single unit. If it doesn’t land, you’re stuck.

Without MOQs, you order two or three units of each product you’re curious about. You list them. You see what sells, what questions customers ask, what your margin actually looks like after shipping. If one product moves well, you order more. If another sits, you’ve lost almost nothing.

The math changes completely. Testing becomes a cost of doing business rather than a risk to manage.

Mix Brands in a Single Cart — And Why That Matters

Testing across categories gets even more powerful when you can mix products from multiple manufacturers in a single order. At Randmar, that’s how every cart works. You’re not locked into placing separate orders with each brand, hitting separate minimums, managing separate shipments.

Want to test three TP-Link routers, two Verbatim external drives, and a set of Contigo tumblers to see if drinkware fits your store? One cart, one order. You can run parallel tests across completely different categories without the logistical overhead that would make it impractical anywhere else.

That flexibility doesn’t just help with testing — it opens up a different approach to your whole catalogue strategy. Instead of specializing by necessity, you specialize by choice, based on actual performance data.

The Compounding Effect Over Time

The resellers who grow consistently aren’t necessarily the ones who started with the best instincts about which products would sell. They’re the ones who ran more experiments and learned faster.

No-MOQ access is what makes that kind of velocity possible. Each test gives you real data: which categories convert, which price points your customers accept, which brands carry weight with your specific audience. That data compounds. A reseller who runs 20 product tests a quarter learns faster than one who runs four.

Over 12 months, that difference in testing volume translates into a meaningfully different business — a more focused catalogue, better margin, a clearer sense of what your customers actually buy versus what you assumed they would.

Getting Started

Randmar gives Canadian resellers access to 69 manufacturers and over 17,000 SKUs through one platform, with no minimum orders and Canadian inventory across four warehouses. Whether you sell on Shopify, Amazon, your own site, or from a physical location, the catalogue is available to browse at commercial pricing from day one.

If you’ve been holding back on testing new products because the MOQ math didn’t work, it’s worth seeing what the math looks like without it.

Create your free reseller account at randmar.io and start browsing the full catalogue.