Imitation and silver stock is bought three ways: from a manufacturing town, from a wholesale bazaar in a big city, or from a supplier’s WhatsApp catalogue without leaving your own counter. All three are normal trade, and they differ in what you can ask for as much as in what you pay.
The city matters less than a new buyer expects. What decides your price is which of four people you are on the phone with: the maker, the wholesaler who stocks him, the dealer, or the agent who carries no stock at all. One call is enough to tell you which. Where the stock comes from is one of the decisions in what a jewellery seller decides first.
Decide what you are asking for before you call. A quote is a list: style number, what the piece is, price, minimum order, terms. Asking for it in those words is what turns a folder of photographs with prices in the captions into one.
That same sheet works from the other side too, when you quote your own buyers. Its columns are what a supplier owes you, and typing his quote into it shows what he left out.
Which market makes the kind of stock I sell?
Buy Rajkot’s anklets in a Delhi bazaar and you pay Rajkot’s price with a Delhi margin on it, which is ordinary trade: what you buy back is the week you would have spent travelling. A centre’s reputation tells you what is made there, and where it is cheapest to buy is a separate question.
| Centre | Known in the trade for |
|---|---|
| Rajkot, Gujarat | Silver at scale: payal (anklets), chandi (silver) chains, daily-wear ranges |
| Purdilpur, Gorakhpur | Imitation and fashion jewellery in mixed lots |
| Sadar Bazar, Delhi | General wholesale: imitation, dress accessories, packing material |
| Zaveri Bazaar, Mumbai | The old precious trade, gold and diamond |
| Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu | One-gram gold covering (a base metal carrying a thin gold layer), made in volume |
| Salem, Tamil Nadu | Silver anklets and covering lines |
| Jaipur, Rajasthan | Kundan (stones set in gold foil), polki (uncut diamond), meenakari (enamel work), loose stones |
| Hyderabad, Laad Bazaar | Moti (pearls), and bangles built on a lac resin core |
Which shop inside a market is a maker and which is only a shopfront takes one phone call to find out. Shops move, so make that call before you book a train.
Who am I actually buying from when everyone says wholesale?
A karkhana is a workshop with dies, karigars and usually a plating line, and the other three sell what a karkhana made. All four of them will say wholesale on the phone, and none of them is doing anything wrong. Which one you have on the line decides both what you may ask for and where the minimum comes from: a die run and a plating batch each have a floor, so a karkhana’s minimum is set by the machine.
| Who you are dealing with | Holds stock | Can change a design | Where the minimum comes from | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manufacturer (karkhana) | Only what is running | Yes — die, plating, colour, stone | The die run and the plating batch | Few designs, ordered deep and repeated |
| Wholesaler | Yes, across many makers | No | The pack or the carton | Range, and stock you need this week |
| Regional dealer | A few lines properly | No | Whatever his own supplier set | Fast top-ups close to you |
| Agent or broker | None | Passes the request on | Whatever the maker sets | One design, one colour, small quantity |
The agent is the one worth understanding: he holds nothing, takes a cut and passes your order on, and the cut is the cheap part. Trouble starts when an agent lets you believe he is the maker, because then nobody in the chain answers for a fault.
What is a first buying trip actually for?
Budget the trip as part of the cost of the order — your fare, your nights, and the money you lose on stock bought in a hurry on day one. Come home with four things: the names of firms, their GST numbers, quotes in writing, and a small paid sample order. The tray can stay empty.
Keep the sample honest: one piece of each design you would actually list, half a dozen of them, paid at full price with no favour asked, and packed the way a bulk order would be. A supplier who hand-wraps your six pieces has told you nothing about the hundred.
The parcel then tells you what a quote cannot: the finish on a piece that was not on display, the weight against the weight quoted, the plating colour under your own light, and whether the bill matches the phone call.
How do I read a wholesale quote?
Ask which way the piece is quoted before you ask the price. Imitation and plated ranges go per piece; silver, and anything where the metal is the cost, goes per gram with labour added on top, and the two numbers do not compare directly.
A gram quote is incomplete until it names the purity. 925 is sterling silver, and a quote that says only “silver” names no purity at all. If the shop works in tola, one tola is 11.6638 g. Convert first, then compare two suppliers.
Plating, written on the invoice
Ask for the base metal and the plating to be named on the invoice: brass, alloy or German silver underneath, and what sits on top. “Gold plated” alone says nothing about how long the colour lasts, and it is the phrase you will defend when a customer’s piece changes colour in a month. Whatever he will not write down, you cannot write on a listing.
Read the minimum more carefully than the price per piece, because it decides how much money goes in at one time. A minimum per design and a minimum per order are two different things: thirty designs at twelve pieces each is a very different cheque from twelve designs at thirty pieces each.
Quietly excluded, almost always: GST, packing, freight, transit insurance, and the pieces that arrive unsellable. Add all of it, divide by the pieces you can sell, and read the landed cost per piece before you compare anything. Two quotes that looked far apart at the top of the page often end up level once you do.
How do I pay a supplier I have never met, and what must his bill carry?
An advance with the order, the balance against dispatch, released when the transport receipt or docket number reaches you — that is the shape a first order usually takes. How much goes in as advance is negotiated, and a buyer with no history pays more of it up front; the percentage moves from shop to shop, so anyone quoting you a standard one is describing his own.
Pay into the firm’s account, in the firm’s name, matching the invoice. If he asks you to send it by UPI to a personal number instead, that is your warning.
The bill has to carry the supplier’s name and GSTIN, your name and GSTIN if you hold one, an invoice number and date, and each design with quantity and rate. Then the HSN code: 7113 for precious-metal jewellery, 7117 for imitation. After that, the taxable value, with the tax itemised on a line of its own.
The rate follows the code, not the word on the invoice. Rates against an HSN are set in the GST rate schedule and changed by notification. So read the rate on his bill against the HSN he actually used, and check that pair on the GST portal itself, whatever figure the seller groups are forwarding this week.
On silver made to order, ask for the split. GST on metal and stones is 3% and GST on the making charge is 5%, so one lump figure cannot be checked, and you cannot work it backwards when you price the piece. Whether you need a GSTIN of your own is a separate question with its own page under this pillar.
A supplier who will not raise a bill has not made himself cheaper; he has moved a cost onto you — no input credit, no proof of purchase, nothing to show a marketplace that asks, and nothing behind you if the parcel never arrives. Keep the WhatsApp thread as well: what was agreed, and on what date.
Can I buy without going to the market at all?
Yes — found, quoted, paid and shipped without you leaving the counter. What the trip gave you was the piece in your hand and a look at his actual shop, and three checks stand in for that.
Check the firm before the first rupee moves. The GST portal carries a public taxpayer search: type the GSTIN in and it returns the registered legal name and whether that registration is still active. A landline, a shop address and a firm name that all match are worth more than a hundred photographs. Still, run the search yourself on the day, and read the legal name against the account you are about to pay.
Order the paid sample even when one piece on its own costs more than it would inside a lot.
Then ask for the piece on video, held and turned in a hand, and for the parcel to be filmed while it is packed. Say why: that recording is the evidence a claim needs later, and an honest supplier has no reason to mind.
Every seller who bought that lot got the same catalogue files, which is one way a catalogue comes back marked a duplicate image. Shoot the sample the day it lands, even badly. Badly is still yours.
A B2B app and a directory site differ in one thing: who holds your money. Some apps hold payment until delivery, and that protection is what their cut pays for. A directory sold that supplier a listing and is no part of your deal. Read what a site promises before you trust it to stand behind anyone.
What do I ask on the first call?
Six questions, in one call, in this order.
- Which of these do you make yourself, and which do you buy in? A maker answers design by design without pausing.
- Can I have this one in another plating colour, and what is the minimum? A maker names a minimum and a date. A middleman says he will check and call back.
- What is the base metal under the plating? If he made it, the answer comes back in one word — brass, alloy, German silver.
- What does it weigh, and is that with the stones? On anything sold per gram, that answer is most of the price.
- If five pieces in a hundred arrive with a stone missing, what happens? A maker already has a policy for it; a middleman has an apology.
- Which firm’s name goes on the GST bill? Whatever name he gives is who you are buying from.
None of this makes an agent a cheat: one who answers all six straight and takes a stated cut is often the cheapest way to get twenty pieces of one design, since no karkhana will start a die for twenty. What the six questions buy you is the name of whoever answers when something goes wrong.
What do I do the day the carton arrives?
Count the carton against the invoice, design by design, with the unpacking on video. Report a shortage or a broken piece the same day, to the supplier and to the transporter. A shortage raised next week is your word against a delivered docket.
Then code it, before anything is photographed or listed, so that afterwards you can count sales design by design. Six months on, that is the difference between knowing which jhumka earns and guessing.
Price from landed cost, the figure with everything already added into it. Where the lot goes onto a marketplace, put one piece through what the platform will actually leave you before you list the other ninety-nine. Which counter the money should have gone into is a question these tools cannot answer yet; the Margin Mix Planner will.
Pick three suppliers in one centre this week and put the six questions to each on one call. Order a paid sample from all three, and let the parcels decide it.