For an international trader, it is essential to choose which factory to work with, even if it is a bit of a “win-win situation”. Based on my personal experience, I will describe how to choose a competent supplier from a trader’s point of view. If you are a factory from China, you can also check whether you are capable of doing this. Here are the 8 don’ts of supplier selection.

Don’t choose a supplier of poor quality.

The quality has to be medium to high, and only if it is guaranteed is there any chance of a long-term partnership. Before we formally cooperate with a factory, we will ask them to send us a sample to try before we consider working with them.

Don’t cooperate

Usually, some large factories (with many workers and many orders) can be arrogant and turn a blind eye to small orders, prioritising the production of large orders and delaying the small ones over and over again. We saw a factory on a platform with 11 years of seniority and thought it was great. So we went ahead and negotiated the order, which went well, and signed the contract. Out of trust, we hardly pressed the factory about the progress, but only asked about the progress occasionally. The factory responded that everything was fine, and when the delivery date was approaching, it said that we were going to pick up the goods and asked the factory to make preparations. I felt something was wrong and went straight to their factory, where I found that production was indeed going on usually, but there was no production of our products on the production line. When I later asked the line workers, they said that they had recently received a multi-million dollar order, so all other orders had been postponed. We asked, “We have five days to deliver, and you have no orders lined up? Aren’t they produced in the order in which they are ordered? The factory responded that we would make the goods as soon as possible and deliver them on time, and I said, “This is no way to do business, let alone what is written in the contract, is this the way you do things for an 11-year-old brand?” At this point, the factory manager also got impatient and said “Boss, do our regular customers have to finish their orders first? And your orders are not very big, and there is no delivery date now, so we’ll have to deliver on time.” To avoid problems, I continued to look for a partner factory, and thanks to the internet, we found a small workshop with about ten people to help with the production at the same time.

Although the impact wasn’t significant, the experience also showed that the degree of cooperation from the factory was more practical than the so-called “11-year old factory”.

Don’t be suspicious

For some pop-up products, it is not easy to find a factory, as the market is chaotic and there are many cheats. So some factory owners are so suspicious that they ask them to send us some samples but then forget about it for a while. I’ll give you a refund on the sample fee when the order is complete.” Unable to argue, I walked away in silence.

The factory owner doesn’t have any judgement or courage, and we don’t want to work with someone who will only gibber if anything goes wrong.

No more scoundrels!

Factory leaders must be honest and try to do what they say they are going to do, they prefer to lose a little to prevent their customers from losing too much, and their willingness to take risks is not only boldness but also quality. They should not be treacherous and stingy people who specialise in screwing customers and do a single thing without a single thing.

Don’t be rigid in your thinking!

But many manufacturers choose cheap circuit boards to save costs, and the sensors are also lacking, resulting in finished products that are either not fully functional or not sensitive. The original one-to-one monkeys, but because the factory feels that there is no money to be made that way because most of the market is full of cheap residuals, the cost of what they do well is high, and when the price is high, they can’t sell it. I said: Your market is a foreign market, you shouldn’t be competing with these defective domestic products on price, how much can you sell only for domestic sales? The owner of the factory shook his head in thought and said, “The foreigners are not stupid and rich, they say the quality of Chinese products is poor, and they keep using Chinese products! “Hey, are you unaware that China has lost its edge as a manufacturing power? It’s all because you are always looking for low prices and don’t ensure the quality of your products. How can you have a market if the quality is not up to standard?” At any rate, he shook his head no to my request, and I had to give up, saying no more, he couldn’t understand, sticking to his old ways, the old thinking of many years ago, I thought they were either going to lose money in this explosion, or they wouldn’t get far. A lot of anger went into the search, but fortunately, we found a factory that we were more than happy with.

Don’t choose the Workers slacking off

Once we went to the factory to look at the goods and saw a lot of workers smoking and chatting, all with their legs crossed and talking with melon seeds because there are no orders for production these days. This gave me a wrong impression, and I wondered what if a cigarette butt or melon seed crumb got stuck in our product while they were producing my order …… The attitude of the factory workers was also a factor in my choice of factory, as a lazy factory might one day cause an accident.

Don’t choose The leadership is complex

The most complicated factory leadership relationship I’ve seen is that the finance is the Boss’s wife, the factory manager is the Boss’s good brother, the warehouse manager is the Boss’s second brother’s wife, the order taker is the Boss’s wife’s nephew …… I want to go to talk about a cooperation thing; the Boss said this you have to find my wife to ask, then the Boss’s wife said the production of things I do not know, you Go ask the plant manager, the plant manager said, you wait, I asked the warehouse …… so one to two, etc. to confirm a thing froze with half a day. Communication efficiency is too low.

Don’t choose the wholesale vendors with No business ethics

Abide by basic business ethics, cooperate positively with trading companies and do not compete with them for their customers. Also, be honest, communicate with us in advance about what can and cannot be done, and cooperate as efficiently as possible, without concealment or delay. Factories should understand that if their customers are trading companies, then they should be on the same front, their people, rather than doing a lot of concealment and delay to get orders, resulting in the trading company losing foreign customers and breaking up with the factory.

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