A
reseller is a company or individual that purchases goods or services with the intention of reselling them rather than consuming or using them. This is usually done for profit (but could be resold at a loss). One example can be found in the industry of
telecommunicationTelecommunication is the transmission of information over significant distances to communicate. In earlier times, telecommunications involved the use of visual signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs, or audio messages via coded...
s, where companies buy excess amounts of transmission capacity or call time from other carriers and resell it to smaller carriers.
According to the Institute for Partner Education & Development, a resellers' product fulfillment-based business model includes a corporate reseller, retail, direct market reseller (DMR), and eTailer; less than 10 percent of its revenue comes from services.
Internet
Resellers are known to conduct operations on the
InternetThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
through sites on the web.
For example, this occurs where individuals or companies act as agents for
ICANNThe Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a non-profit corporation headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, United States, that was created on September 18, 1998, and incorporated on September 30, 1998 to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly...
accredited
registrarA domain name registrar is an organization or commercial entity, accredited by both ICANN and generic top-level domain registry to sell gTLDs and/or by a country code top-level domain registry to sell ccTLDs; to manage the reservation of Internet domain names in accordance with the guidelines of...
s. They either sell on commission or for profit and in most cases, but not all, the purchase from the registrar and the sale to the ultimate buyer occurs in
real timeIn computer science, real-time computing , or reactive computing, is the study of hardware and software systems that are subject to a "real-time constraint"— e.g. operational deadlines from event to system response. Real-time programs must guarantee response within strict time constraints...
. These resellers are not to be confused with speculators, who purchase many domain names with the intention of holding them and selling them at some future time at a profit. Resellers, by the very nature of their business are retailers.
Another common example of this is in the web hosting area, where a reseller will purchase bulk
hostingAn Internet hosting service is a service that runs Internet servers, allowing organizations and individuals to serve content to the Internet. There are various levels of service and various kinds of services offered....
from a supplier with the intention of reselling it to a number of consumers at a profit.
Software and ebooks
Software and ebooks are two products that are very easy to obtain by resellers. Their digital format makes them ideal for internet distribution. In many cases, such as
brandable softwareBrandable software is typically software created by one company for the purpose of allowing other companies to obtain resell rights or giveaway rights to the software, change the brand associated with it, and sell it as if it were their own...
, the reseller can obtain even the right to change the name of the software and claim it as one's own and resell it on an ebook shop hosting platform such as
eBuckz.