Many customers should know Alibaba because it is the most famous e-commerce website in China. But when it comes to how to wholesale from Alibaba, many sellers’ minds are blank. Today we will show you more details about Alibaba review, discuss the scams information to help new sellers do China wholesale more smoothly.
What’re the advantages & disadvantages that wholesale from Alibaba?
Many foreign sellers are looking to Asia, especially China, to source their products. Where the most common reason to find suppliers is to take advantage of low manufacturing costs. Manufacturing costs in Asia are likely to be much lower than in North America and the rest of the world, so much so that for many companies it can be difficult to make money without overseas manufacturing. But what’re the benefits that wholesale from Alibaba?
Cheaper product costs are good, but they are not the only reason why Asia attracts suppliers. There are also some additional benefits. We will list them one by one, and we will also list some disadvantages encountered in the procurement process so that sellers can avoid them in advance.
Advantages
- Lower manufacturing costs
- China has so many suppliers to choose from
Different products and can be customized according to requirements - Support multi-platform purchasing
- One-stop service, like Alibaba or others China sourcing agent(RunSourcing.com)
- Many suppliers are willing to accept small orders
Along with the advantages, there are also some disadvantages will be listed following.
But, there are some disadvantages that can be solved. For example, the geographical distance has a great impact on quality control, it makes the foreign customers very headache. But for sellers, especially for small sellers, start-up who can consider getting a China agent to help them find China wholesale suppliers or sourcing various products. The best China sourcing agent will provide you services of samples confirming & pre-shipment inspection, we will escort your products
Disadvantages
- Cultural differences and language barriers
- Complex product import and customs clearance
- Longer shipping time
- Hard to build trust, not trust to pay
- Difficult to visit factories and check the quality of products
- Not clear about the industry market, it is easy to be deceived
Is it safe to purchase from Alibaba?
The short answer is yes, Alibaba is absolutely safe.
But for a variety of reasons, the Chinese market has earned a somewhat dubious reputation among international traders. For this reason, many new businesses are wary of Alibaba, seeing it as a scam. After all, a portal offering ridiculously low prices and poor English doesn’t paint a pretty picture. Essentially, what you need to do is find the right supplier, and that’s the hard part. The most dangerous obstacles to finding the perfect supplier are the scammers and middle-men.
Below, you’ll find a step-by-step guide to how to buy products safely on Alibaba.
Step 1 – Review the Company Profile
It is a very important step to know the supplier information, through which you can clearly know that the supplier you cooperate with really exists and can be trusted.
Company name
When you look for suppliers, the first thing that comes to your eyes is the name of the supplier’s company，company names are also need to learn.
City: small and medium-sized businesses will be located in the city as part of the company name. For example, “Qingdao trade co., LTD.”.
Provinces: larger companies can be named after their provinces. For example, “Shandong trade co., LTD.”
Supplier Qualification
Another quick way to check if your Alibaba suppliers are safe is to see if they have on-site inspections and are gold suppliers. These logos that suppliers cannot place on the website by themselves, and can only be displayed after on-site inspection by Alibaba professionals. In this way, Alibaba has verified the existence of suppliers.
Payment Terms
When you get the basic trust from the supplier and enter the step of placing an order, the payment method will undoubtedly affect your interests. You need to pay attention to whether your supplier accepts a secure payment method, that can ensure you can actually receive the product. If you never receive these products, they will pay you back and fight with the supplier on your behalf.
- AliPay (Fairly Safe)
- PayPal (Most Safe)
- Credit Cards (Fairly Safe)
Quality inspection certificate
A “good manufacturer” that will continuously monitor quality inspection. If a supplier does not have certificates and just talks about “high-quality products without any defects”, this supplier cannot be trusted.
ISO compliance can be evaluated in the quality testing of this supplier, and even many suppliers will pass various certificates according to the products, such as SGS, CE certification and so on. It is not only the quick inspection before product packaging and shipment, but suppliers must also inspect the incoming materials and parts before production, set up inspection stations in the production process, and conduct a final inspection after production.
Step 2 – Maintain good communication with suppliers and communicate timely
Minimum order quantity (MOQ)– if you are a small seller and newbie, MOQ is very important to you. Many Chinese suppliers are willing to open their doors to foreign companies and start from small orders. What they expect is a long-term, stable relationship with you.
Sample pricing – try to communicate with the supplier as much as possible, tell him your order plan, such as the order quantity for half a year, and tell him that you are willing to cooperate with him for the next several times if the first order goes well. In this way, the supplier is willing to provide you with free samples, but you need to pay the express fee. However, because some samples are expensive and cannot be provided for free, you also need to ask the supplier for the price.
Production price – product quotation is flexible. In fact, many Chinese suppliers value long-term cooperation rather than on cooperation.
Step 3 – Carefully review the supplier’s products/Niche
In the last step, you need to carefully observe the products of the supplier to determine whether you are a match.
Confirmed list
Does your product exist in Alibaba catalog?
Does your product account for a large proportion of the products displayed on the supplier’s website?
Is the product specification shown by the supplier similar to the one you need?
How to use Alibaba to sourcing your supplier?
Alibaba makes it very easy for anyone to find the products they need. Next, let’s discuss how to find your target supplier through Alibaba.
Create your Alibaba account
To keep your email from drowning in vendor inquiries, I recommend that you create a separate Gmail account or corporate email. If your email looks unprofessional, many vendors will dismiss your inquiries as worthless, even dismiss your email as a fraud, or put in spam inquiries box.
Change the search box from “Products” to Suppliers
Below pictures for your reference.
Choose the right keywords and related keyword phrases
The whole premise of search engines is built around keywords. If you know the keywords you want to search for, you can narrow down and find the exact product. Instead, if you search with the wrong keywords, you will waste critical time and energy. For example, if you search for “rain boots”, there are many suppliers, they make PVC rain boots or rubber rain boots
You can narrow down your keywords a bit so that you can find your suppliers more quickly and accurately. For example, what you need is transparent rain shoes. You can input keywords“transparent rain boots” instead of “rain boots”. Because rain shoes bring too many suppliers and produce too many rain shoes styles, you need time to screen them.
Picking your suppliers
Next to the rain shoe supplier you search, there will be many small ICONS, such as the number of transactions completed by the seller, the transaction level indicated by the diamond icon, the transaction guarantee icon and the response rate of the seller, but these are not the most important, the gold supplier icon is the performance of the comprehensive ability of the supplier.
The term “gold supplier” means a legal company that pays an annual fee of 2,900 yuan according to law and is registered as a gold supplier. Please note the trading history or the number of years in which the seller was a gold supplier. However, gold suppliers can also be traders or a combination of traders and producers. They don’t have to be manufacturers with factories.
The term “evaluated supplier” means that the supplier owns a factory evaluated by Alibaba. Assessed suppliers must pay three times the price of gold suppliers, which is one of the most trustworthy badges
Contact your suppliers
Click the “Contact Supplier” button on the product page.
I recommend following the script provided here. Of course, according to your actual situation to change the product information and your name, you can modify it according to your preferences.
Want to visit your supplier?
Would you like to visit the factory that may potentially produce your goods?
Would you like to travel to some of the many trade shows in China?
The planning that goes into visiting a factory is very time-consuming. Runsourcing.com would love to help you organize your next trade or factory tour.
Some of our clients like to come over to China and get to know the factory/factories before the production process starts. Once at the factory, we will take care of all translation and any questions you have will be answered by our bi-lingual team members. This is our area of expertise:
- Airport pick up
- Accommodation arrangements
- Factory introductions
- Factory tours
- Translation services
- All transport – planes, trains, buses, and minivans.
RunSourcing is a leading sourcing agent in China, We like helping small to medium business or even new importers source good price and quality products in China, guiding them to avoid all kinds of potential importing risks. Sourcing suppliers, negotiation, signing contract, production follow-up, quality inspection, arranging shipment, What kind of service do you need that we can provide.