Reseller
A reseller is a store that buys products made by other companies and sells them under the makers' brands rather than its own.
How it works
A reseller buys products made by other companies to sell them for profit, not to use them. The brand belongs to the maker, and other stores can list exactly the same product.
In Shopping ads this sets the terms of competition: other retailers can advertise the same products you sell. Merchant Center’s price competitiveness report shows how those retailers price them. Our guide to private label or reseller compares what growing stores of each type did differently.
Example
Example store, not client data.
The tableware shop sells glassware from twelve manufacturers under their brands, so for that range it is a reseller. Its best-selling glass set costs 600 in the shop, and the price competitiveness report shows a benchmark price of 540 for the same set. 600 ÷ 540 = 1.11, so the shop’s price is 11% above the benchmark.
Not to be confused with
- Private label — products sold under the store’s own brand. As long as only the store sells that brand, no other shop lists the same item.
- Channel conflict — the clash when a maker’s sales routes compete for the same buyer. A reseller is one of those routes, not the conflict itself.
Right and wrong readings
- Wrong: “For a reseller, the lowest price wins.” Right: price matters, but it explains a small part of the result. In our study of 1.4 million products, 11.7% of products priced more than 20% above the market had conversions, against 20.4% of those at market price. Yet across 213,913 products, the correlation between price gap and result was r = −0.075.
- Wrong: “A reseller needs a different Google Ads playbook from an own-brand store.” Right: stores differ more by order volume than by business type. In GetProfit data, business type separated stores on 4 of 20 metrics, and order volume on 14 of 20. We tagged the 114 stores by hand: 20 own-brand stores, 18 single-brand dealers, 27 with a narrow set of brands, 40 multi-brand resellers and a few others.
Sources
- Understand the market — Merchant API, last updated 24 September 2026: the price competitiveness report shows how other retailers price the same products you sell. Checked 2 October 2026.
- Reseller — Wikipedia: a merchant that buys goods to sell them for profit, not to use them. Checked 2 October 2026.
- GetProfit study: 213,913 products in 51 accounts, price position against conversions.
- GetProfit data: 114 stores tagged by business type.