How to find a supplier in china

Why you choose to import? 

Nowadays, most of the companies even personal retailers are doing exporting and importing issues for our business. Why we do that? Because of profits, we can get. The business pursues margins by purchasing and selling whoever you are retailer, wholesaler, and trader. If there are margins, importing exists. 

We have served lots of customers around the world and part of them are retailers. They usually are newcomers in the field of importing. The orders from them is small but they purchase much frequently than the importer and wholesaler. And most of the factories cannot help retailers to get what they want. Why? Because of the minimum order quantity (MOQ) is much bigger than they actually need. 

However, there are still a larger amount of retailers try to import the products from the manufacturers directly. They need a better price to get more profit than buying from wholesaler in their country. All because of the profit. 

By importing from manufacturer directly, you can get the customized products with better price, so as stock models. 

On the other hand, price might be a big concern of finding a supplier, but service is a much important factor. I would let you know how you can find a reliable manufacturer in China in this article. 

Firstly, you need to figure out what you really need and the purchase volume per year or per month. Then, you can find the most suitable factory for you. You might meet some bad supplier before who always ignore your message or requirements, or even quote you a very expensive price. That’s not because of they are a terrible supplier, just because of that you are not the suitable client for them in the aspect of order volume. So they use a negative attitude to treat you in order to not do your business. 

In a word, to find a suitable supplier is more important than find a big and powerful manufacturer. 

Secondly, to categorize the information. A common problem occurred in the purchasing is the communication between each other. To make the conversation continually, you need to catagorize the information you’ve got. And send to the supplier by PDF or Excel file via email to check. 

The advantage of this action is you will get the proof when the quality problem occurred. The more details you put in the file, the more evidences you get. Then you can ask for counterclaim or reproduce the goods. 

Until now, the preparation of yourself is finished in mind and in data. Then you can start to find the right supplier now. There are some ways to look for the right manufacturer, the B2B platform, google search, yellow page and the trade fair. Let us discuss the advantage and disadvantage of them. 

1)B2B platform. I believe that you already know about this. For example, if you search “cap manufacturers” or "hat manufacturers" in Google, the result in the top will be alibaba.com or global-source.com. Something like that. 

And when you click it in the platform, you will get lots of suppliers. All of them are golden supplier which mean the paid user. They pay more than 10K dollars each year to put their product into the website. Just like the google adwards, the suppliers in the B2B platform will have extra cost to put their items in the top no matter the supply ability or service is good or not. 

You might get lots of suppliers in the website of platform, but it will also cost a lot of time and money of communicating with the bad service manufacturer. You don’t know what supplier is good in the platform, only their products showed there. 

So in a word, if you are a big company with a large purchase plan, and you have enough time and money to test the quality, the B2B platform is a good place to compare the price and service. 

2)Yellow page. This is a old way to find the contact way of your business partner. Even you find the supplier you need, the information might be invaid already. However, you can also find the right factory which has existed for many years. If you are a big buyer, this way is also reliable. 

3)The trade fair. Trade fair is a very popular way to find good suppliers 20 years ago. Most of the hat suppliers who can start an exhibition in the fair will cost more than 50K dollars once. Not only for sellers, the buyers will also have the cost of the business trip. So it is the best way to show sincerity to each other. 

Because of the popularity of the internet, we can find more information by google. The trade fair is not much effective than before. 

We are a company doing hats and caps and we went to East china fair every time until the last year. To be honest, the client is less than before. And the facotry is not as good as 5 years ago. 

4)Google search. The last way I want to recommend is to google search. You can say that the B2B platform and yellow pages are both on the base of google search. But what I want to teach you is to delete the platform and yellow page by google search instruction. And text the keywords to find the official website of the manufacturer. 

Let me explain why. Still use my company as a example, we use Alibaba.com as our mian platform for 5 years. But most of the buyer on alibaba didn’t trust that you are a manufacturer or you are a reliable person. Because there are too many ads. They cannot justify which is good for them, even we have paid more than 5K dollars to get the better rank on alibaba. Most of buyers will ask, “do you have website on your own? Not the mini site on Alibaba. “ We care more about yourself to know about the situation of factory. 

They trust alibaba but they don’t trust the supplier on it. Because they do not know the rules. So that’s why we need to find the factory direct website to check. 

Expect the trust problem, what is the other reason of choosing the website? 

(1)Marketing Ability and customer service. A manufacturer has their own website and it has a good rank in google search, the surface looks nice and everything is good. What do you think of this company? It might have great customer service and marketing ability. 

(2)Responsive time. You can test their reply time when you are in the website of target supplier. The less responsive time means the more important they think you are. This is an attitude to the client. And a quick reply company is a good supplier which tries their best for marketing which you can trust. 

(3)By use searching instruction, you will not see the B2B platform and yellow page. You can add the following instruction to your search room. 

-B2B -Marketplace -leads -platform -directory -connecting -member -buyers  -.cn -forum -"yellow pages" -yellowpages -online -shop -store -blog -wikipedia -youtube -.edu -.gov  

You will only see the official website of your target suppliers. Then just review and choose one. Different products have extremely different rules to choose the supplier. But there are some common standards of collecting, such as production ability, reply time, honest, delivery time, price, certificate and so on. I am doing garment accessories, like hats, gloves, and scarves. Maybe I can write another passage of the supplier of garment in China when I got time. Please let me know by contacting us or writing a common.