Finding anime distributors and wholesalers ?

I plan on opening an online anime shop ( specializing in all things Berserk of course lol ) and was wondering if any of you have any insight on how to track down the distributors and wholesalers ? I came across a lot of sites but most of them were based in china selling knock off stuff . AAA anime seems to be the only good source i found for wholesale but im drawing a blank on the distributors . Any help in this department will be great and general info and advice and ideas you guys would like to see on a online anime shop is also much appreciated . I wish it were as simple to call up Bandai and buy direct from them but it seems that is not the norm lol .

Just some friendly advice, I would seriously look into the financial sustainability of it first. ADV was basically destroyed by piracy and can't even get torrents taken off of The Pirate Bay. As someone who buys legitimately released anime, it makes my blood boil to see so many series cancelled or go unreleased, but piracy is all but killing anime sales.

Thanks for the advice , that is something i thought of already . My main focus will be on anime merchandise like figures , plush , posters , and pretty much everything else there is to do with anime . The actual amount of anime dvd i sell will be small in comparison to the other merch and thats really where the money is anyway .

Go straight to the source. I'm sure you could go to the main sites and find contact info regarding how to sell their products.

Thanks for idea man, worked for a few of the figure companies like figuarts and figma but still cant find much especially for the actual anime itself . I did find a few distributors who offer a wide blanket of merch though so thats a positive step ! I need to legalize the business though before i can join any of these distributors though . How cool would it be if i can work something out of Kensin from AOW for discounted bulk orders or something . Any other ideas out there or things you guys think no other anime sites are doing that you want ? I have a a lot of ideas but i wanna know what everyone wants so i can make something that will last and be a staple in the online anime community .

The problem in your situation is that wholesalers aren't very interested in small orders and many won't be interested in dealing with you at all. I used to work for a middle-man collector business that bought wholesale to drop-ship for smaller distributors. The idea was that we pooled the needs of all the smaller stores to put large orders in to the wholesalers. Even so we were the wholesalers' last priority; if there wasn't enough product, Diamond Comics Distributors would get everything they'd ordered before we'd get anything. The place I worked for failed when the economy started to tank; Diamond, our competitor, is still around. Diamond, even though it's just a middle man, is only interested in accounts ordering around $500/mo worth of product. Looks like you already found AAAanime. There's also Entertainment Earth: Distribution http://www.entertainmentearth.com/eedistribution.asp and http://www.bbcw.com/

Not sure about anime wholesaling but I'm sure more google fu could be applied to the problem.

Thanks for links bud this will help a lot , does diamond do anime also ? Their site has little info for ppl without an account .