Hi,
Thought I might give my 2 cents.
Couple years back, I've had the same thoughts and contacted alot of the manufacturers and distributors. It seems that when you're ordering with such minimal investment, your discount rates will mean that your FOB pricing is going to be similar or may be a couple dollars off what the big guys are retailing at.
Don't forget since it's FOB, you will have to consider shipping from distributor to you and from you to your end user, which will put your products at a price point where it's just way too high to convince any buyers who are now very savy on price comparison.
A friend of mine has made this dream a little further by opening up his very own brick and mortar store. He ran into the same thing, his prices were too high, so what he had to do to turn things around was to order in even bigger bulk, but of course forming an alliance with many fellow businessmen where everyone only had the means to order in smaller bulk.
Even then, they managed to drop their bulk prices, it was only gonna mean that the profit margin for them was only about $3 to $10 per say tub of whey (usually the lower end). A tub typically lasts people a month or so depending how heavy a drinker they are, so effectively, each customer he has is only gonna give him $3 to $10 per month per item bought. Which is not very lucrative at all considering that each tub already cost around $25 to $40 a tub.
Consider your rents for storage, man power, to be frank, my buddy is saying it's only making enough like a slightly lower end wage, the only good thing for him is that he gets to be his own boss, that's all.
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