Category: Importing Guides

Planning to buy bulk stock products from wholesalers in China? Depending on your industry, and target market, buying off shelf goods may be a dead end. ‘Make to order’ is the standard mode of operations when outsourcing production to manufacturers in Asia. Manufacturing is a risky and time consuming process, so wouldn’t it just be a lot easier to buy goods that are already available in stock?

The answer is sometimes yes, but mostly, no. Whether or not off-shelf procurement is a viable strategy, depends on various factors, including the type of product, and your market.

Part 1: What Importers Must Know About Buying Bulk Products

Manufacturers in China, and most other places in Asia, operate according to a ‘make to order’ principle. This means that the supplier doesn’t keep products in stock. In fact, most suppliers don’t even keep raw materials and components in stock. Instead, they procure the necessary raw materials, from their subcontractors, as it’s needed to produce goods for their own customers. At least, this is how it works for goods made for export markets. Continue reading Buying Bulk Stock Products (Off Shelf) from China

China has evolved into an increasingly sophisticated production hub. While MNCs in certain industries might consider other manufacturing bases, China (and Guangdong province in particular) has never been more attractive to e-commerce companies and hardware Startups. On the other end of the supply chain, Amazon.com and Shopify are making it easier and faster than ever to gain market access.

‘Who is an Industry outsider?’

In this ‘gold rush’, the doors are essentially open to anyone, including the industry outsider – a company or individuals without any previous experience in the industry. Think bankers going sportswear designers. The industry outsider is largely unaware of how ‘quality’ is defined for their product. Meanwhile, they tend to assume that the supplier is responsible for ensuring a certain, perhaps imaginary and undefined, quality standard. Continue reading Spec Sheets: Defining Quality As an Industry Outsider

Good things sometimes take time. Sometimes, far longer than most importers first anticipate. Slow communication, misunderstandings and endless sample revisions can cost businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost profits. That’s exactly what we address in this article. Keep reading, and learn what you can do to get your products delivered on schedule, without cutting corners.

1. Purchase ODM (Private Labelled) Products

Developing a new product from scratch can be far more time consuming. Chinese manufacturers may provide limited assistance, but they rely on you to provide them with the complete set of documentation and files required to produce tooling and prototypes, prior to mass production. New OEM designs must also be tested, and it’s often very hard to foresee design flaws and technical issues before a pre-production sample is made. Even the simplest apparel design may require several revisions before your specification is translated into a reference sample that is ready to hit the production lines. Continue reading How to Avoid Delays & Save Time When Buying from China

When buying from China, adopt the mindset that everything will go wrong – until the opposite has been proven. Business owners making decisions based on assumptions of “how things should be handled”, or “how things are done back home”, are prone to find themselves with a lighter wallet. The key to success lies not in learning the customs of tea drinking, or handing over your business card with both hands. Such things are, contrary to what many so called ‘China experts’ say, largely irrelevant when dealing with Chinese manufacturers.

There are no written rules as to how the process shall be managed. You are entirely on your own, and the outcome is decided by the applied procedure. Extreme pragmatism is the answer. A million things can go wrong, and they will, unless you take action now. Risks must be managed from the very first email sent to a supplier, to the factory floor. That’s what we’ll cover in this article. Keep reading, and learn more about the 6 measures that truly make the difference between success and failure.

1. Supplier Screening: Avoid choosing the wrong supplier from the start

The purpose is to avoid scammer and ‘unqualified suppliers’ from the very beginning. Time is money, and why invest months of work on a supplier that’s unable to ensure compliance with local regulations and your own quality requirements from the very beginning? I don’t need to further explain why you should avoid scammers, but they are out there, and deals that seem to good to be true are often exactly that. Continue reading 7 Ways to Prevent Quality Issues & Scams When Buying from China

Developing a new product is always a challenge, but much more so when samples and prototypes are manufactured on the other side of the planet. This is one, of many reasons, why the product development process is a true minefield, riddled with potential disasters, and the top time killer for small businesses, outsourcing production to China, and other Asian countries.

In this article, we explain how Chinese manufacturers operate, and how this has a direct impact on how the product development process must be managed. We also explain why you should never rely on your OEM manufacturer to manage the product development procedure for you. Keep reading, and learn how to avoid some of the most common, and disastrous, mistakes made by importers during the most critical phase of the whole importing procedure.

#1: Making a Supplier Selection Without Prior Qualification

In a perfect world, suppliers can be divided into two categories: ‘The good’, and ‘The bad’. But in reality, it’s not all that simple. Instead, I see suppliers as divided into three categories: ‘The good’, ‘the bad’ – and suppliers which are ‘good’, yet not technically qualified to take on the project. The latter category is the one I’ll shed some light on here. Continue reading 4 Common Product Development Mistakes When Buying from Asia