The Humidor Seller’s Marketplace.

Depending on where you shop, eBay in particular, you will find sellers passing plain wooden boxes off as cigar humidors. They toss in a single Spanish cedar divider and claim that all you need is a single pieces of Spanish cedar in the humidor for the aroma. This gives them away as idiots, in my view, and they are clearly only in the humidor business because they saw others doing it and wanted a piece of that action.  They don’t understand what Spanish cedar actually brings to the humidor, and their products should be avoided at all cost. I singled out eBay, but there really are a lot of great deals there, on very good quality humidors.  It is important to do more than look at the pretty pictures when you shop. Read the description and be sure that the humidor you buy is fully lined with Spanish cedar and that the seller appears to be an expert in the field.

At minimum, 90% of all cigar humidors sold around the world originate in China. If you have done any comparison shopping you have most likely noticed that every seller seems to carry the same humidors that their competitors carry.  Chances are they purchased their humidors from the same whole sale distributer, but even that is not necessarily true. There are two main distributers here in the USA, Quality Importers, and The Orleans Group. You can find them on the internet.  Both of them have their own particular line of humidors, but that does not necessarily mean that they are the only source for that particular humidor.  Both of these distributers import their product from China.  What’s good about this is that if one manufacturer goes out of business, they don’t have to look very far to find another manufacturer who will make the exact same humidors. In China no single company gets to hold the exclusive rights to a humidor design.  To help illustrate this, if you’re interested. Go to alibaba.com, a website that connects businesses with manufacturers, and browse the humidor listings. It won’t take long before you notice the same humidors being sold by different companies.

Currently the cigar and humidor martket is quite robust, but in that past few years the humidor market has begun to softened.  With so many state and local governments passing smoking bans, folks who got involved with cigars because of the social and networking opportunities it provided have since left the gang and there are far fewer people interested in buy cigar humidors. What was once an almost exclusively eBay market has spread out along the internet.  A quick look at Google ad words shows that the key word search terms for cigars and humidors are very active and quite competative. Breking into this online business is tough without help from people who know how to get a website noticed  by people searching for cigars and humidor.  A number of individuals have held the top spots in serach ranking for the past decade. Someone new to e-commerce may find it frustrating to open a new web store only to see no sales because their website doesn't seem to be anywhere on teh internet.