Alibaba is the best business platform to find the supplies for all kinds，the products, but there’s still, you, not. the people have en’t, use it, or don’t know how to use the correctly or savely. that’s why i decided to make it this. most informative and comprehensive guide to eliminate all your concerns and show you the correct who process set by step from searching of apples until we see products.

 

I am Lacier,the CEO of Leiz International,which is leading china sourcing company to help you get what you want.I will share my knowledge is about sourcing products in China. How to buy product on what about this is the very big and complicated question. so i decided to organize this topic with two sections.In section one, you can learn the basic knowledge about how of the platform and how it works,if you already have ideas about this knowledge, then you can move the progress 2, and i will help you to learn how to buy on Alibaba from send inquiry to receive the products.

Alibaba group in china is kind like google in America.They have so many products like, taobao,tmall,aliexpress,alipay, and Alibaba.com is just one of their product. and also it’s their first part products, which was built around twenty years ago, this website is mainly for foreign people to find supplies in china. But now you can also find the supplies all of the world.

 

Alibaba.com is the dominating B2B trading platform for similar website like glaobalsources,made in china. they are kind search engine like bing or yahoo,when compared with google, over 90%  people use the google to search, and over 90% people use alibaba to find supplies online, but is alibaba really right for you or your business?

 

Don’t buy any brand products like iphone,NIke shoes. because all of this products, they have their own distribution network in every countries, even though they are made in china,but on Alibaba,you won’t not get the good price for buying them in quantity. And also, you will have very high risk of being scammed.

 

If your purchasing is less than USD500 for one product, don’t use it, Even Alibaba is good for small businesses，but it’s not good for too small business, if you want to find world-class manufacturer that has supplied the big brands, like find a lingerie manufacturer for of victoria’s secret or find a shoes manufacturer for Nike,Addidas, i would not say, don’t use alibaba, but you almost can not find them here,because their target customers are usually the big companies and big buyers.But the main buyers of alibaba are usually small to medium size business, so alternatively visitng trade shows like canton fair,will be much easier to find this type of factories.

 

So how does the purchasing alibaba work? essentially, alibaba is like online, three show. you can find the supplies for all kinds of products and learning products via photos or descriptions, and evaluate supplier’s the background by company information, but you can not really complete the whole producing process online as simple as aliexpress or amazon.why? because Alibaba Is used for international trading. and you’re was supposed to deal with factories, trading companies. and purchase the products in large quantity or customize a product, and make you own package or own brands. so every customer have different kind of requirement on the product. and supplier usually don’t have inventory, and they will start production after you place the order, because this is international trading, and the products or packages usally are customized. so if you are not satisfied with the products you received, it’s almost not possible to return the product back to china and get for refund. i did not see any people really made it to get their product returned, and almost no one will tell you this truth.

When you are doing the product search on alibaba, the prices you see are not the real, because most of the transactions are not complete online,and the suppliers will try to mark their price as low as possible to attract your inquiries. And this is the very common tricks they play to stand out from their thousands of competitors. You need to spend a lot of time to find out some suppliers whose business background looks might be good,send the inquiries and they will reply you with the real price, and then you can start the first of communication with the supplier by email.

 

I recommend you to download the, wechat app to communicate with the suppliers, because you can always get the very fast respond, and this is the app that we China people to use for communicating from wake up in the morning until fall asleep at night.

 

For all things i have mentioned above, it looks like sourcing products and buying pro product on Alibaba. it’s kind like full of risks. But don’t worry ,Alibaba has provided the following solutions to help you in evaluate your supplies and secure your purchasing orders.so keep reading.

 

Alibaba has two types of supplier membership，the gold and the verified, you might heard about the gold supplier, because there are a lot of tutorials on the internet that teaches how to buy from Alibaba,and they will say, buy from gold supplier because they reliable. it’s wrong,they probably don’t know the truth that every single chinese supplier is a gold supplier,in china,you have to pay around USD4500 per year, you can become the supplier on alibaba, which is the gold supplier. The verified supplier is kind like higher level than the gold,because the supplier usually need to pass the third party audit, and also need to pay at least USD10,000 per year to alibaba. Then Alibaba will give a veried supplier badge,and also more exposure opportunities to buyers. By my experiences, the gold or the verified membership doesn’t really matters,but the longer years that being a supplier on Alibaba is more important than weather is good or verified supplier.

 

A few years ago, alibaba launched the trade assurance service thus buyers don’t need to worry about being scammed or receive the defect products,it works like this, when you place order, you can write the product specification and the delivery requirement in the trade assurance order, and you pay money to alibaba,and they will help you hold the money until you receive products if you want to learn more about three assurance and how to use it, you can click the link below

https://tradeassurance.alibaba.com/

 

And another question is, who are the supplies on alibaba? there are 3 kinds of supplies on alibaba,manufacturers, trading companies and wholesalers. Trading company and wholesalers are usually buying products from manufacturers, and resell to you. but the difference between trading companies and wholesalers are trading companies usually specialize in certain product categories. While wholesalers usually sell any kind of product, as long as it can bring the profit, and usually their MOQ is lower and the price will be more expensive.

Most of alibaba sourcing tutorials tell you that you must buy from manufacturers and the trading companies is always the middle man to increase the price and rip you off. It’s totally wrong.Ffor a same product. it’s very normal that different manufacturers have price differences, like 10 percent,20 percent, or even more. And sometimes the trading companies’ price will even better than a lot of manufactures. So my advice will be, it’s always better to focus on how to balance between the price,quality and the services, instead of verifying if it’s a real manufacturer, and you only buy from them.

 

Till now you probably have very good understanding about how Alibaba sourcing works,now let me show you how to buy on Alibaba

 

Actually buying from Alibaba is like international trading. i will show you some basic, but very helpful trade knowledge.

 

1. Search of supplies.

 

There are two ways to search supplies on alibaba, direct search and use RFQ. The direct search is just typing in. the keywords in the search bar that you will find all products that has similar keywords from thousands of suppliers. This method is quite suitable for this kind of situation,that when you don’t have a specific type of products or specific appearance of product you want, and you can take time to look around until you find a attractive product, then you can click the contact button and leave a message for requiring a precise quote.

 

If you want to source as specific part product, then i strong recommend you to use alibaba RFQ function which is short for request for quotation. Just type in the url: https://rfq.Alibaba.com and click “Try RFQ now” button, and you will see the RFQ form, just fill it out as detail as you can, according to this instructions. it’s very simple, and you can also attach product of the links or images to describe your requirements better. The very important things you need to know is that describe your requirement as detail as possible, because every alibaba supplier can only reply less than 30 RFQ per month. it’s very limited if your descripation is simple,then they probably will think that you are not serious buyer, and then they don’t want to waste this opportunity to the reply your RFQ

 

After submitting the RFQ form, usually in less than one of our, during the work time in china, you can receive the reply from around ten suppliers with their quotation, and then you can choose the best one among these supplies, if you want to learn more about how to use, i have to affected vely to let as the many quantity supply yer to retell out to you, and less than the, the minutes.

 

2, Identify the suppliers

 

After you fill the RFQ form, you should received a lot of the supplier’s reply very quickly, and then you need to learn how to identify and evaluate it. But if you use the direct research, you need to identify the supplier first, then send them inquiries.Choosing a longer terms supplier  is more important than choosing the lowest quote supplier. Because you want your business  growing. that’s why you need to reliable suppliers to support you with quality products and  services. let me give you six tips for how to choose a good supplier.

 

Tips 1, Check alibaba membership

 

I have explain the basic knowledge of about how supplier membership of works and i recommend you to choose supplies who has at least 3 years membership, no matter it is gold suppliers or verified. Because in china, there are a lot of small manufacturers or small trading companies,they will try selling on alibaba, for 1 of 2 years. they paying few thousand US dollars per year and they did not find they make much money, so they were decide to close their alibaba account,and in this case, you will be out of alibaba protection.

 

Tips 2 Check company’s background.

 

It’s very easy to judge the supplier is manufacture or trading compapnies through their names, because chinese company’s names usually consists of these four elements,Location, Name,Business scope and Company types. in china the same type of products usually factories or training companies, they will gather in the same city or the same province, and we call thiis area as industrial clusters. I recommend you try to find the suppliers according to the industrial clusters, because supplies from those areas, they will be like more professional and their price will be more competitive，the simple way to find where is the industrial cluster class for your product is just search the product in the search bar and then try to find which province has the biggest numbers of supplies and it’s there.

 

For the business scope element, trading companies usually use words like trading import &export,comodity. And factories usually will use industrial,products or certain product names like stainless steel, plastic. You can also go to the supplier profile page to check their business type is trading coming or factories, but sometimes it could be wrong because there are a lot of tricks to play to get the trading companies registered as a manufacturer.

 

Tips 3 Check product category

 

A good supplier. they should be very professional on products. so you need to check their product cargoes, for example, wine tumbler is made of stainless steel, and it’s normal that. the supplier is also selling other kinds of products that made of stainless steel. but if in his product category, there are a lot of any other product that has no relationship with stainless steel or drinkwares,then he might not be a very good option for a good supplier.There are many suppliers on alibaba, especially for trading companies and wholesalers. they uploard thousands and thousands of products. in order to get more inquires from new clients, instead of focusing on certain area

 

Tips 4. Choose supplies who accept trade assurance orders

 

It’s very easy to understand because this kind of supplier is very confident about their quality,and they know if there’s any product of defects, the client will open dispute with alibaba, and they can get compensation

Tips 5 Check compliance certification

 

For electronic,toys, most of the countries need compliance certification for import custom clearance, so you must to choose supplies. who has the certifications to your country，for example, the electronic part products in need of fcc certifications for united states and CE certifications for european countries. so only when the supplier has related certifications, it can prove that their products comply with the regulation in your country, and you can also identified the supplies’s proficiency via certifications.Household goods

 

Tips 6 Price and Minimum Order Quantity

 

Now you probably understand why the price is not the most important thing to choose the right suppliers. Except for choosing competitive supplies, you also need to think about their minimum order quantity, and usually it’s not hard to negotiate the MOQ like 20 or 50% lower,and you can tell of supplier that your are willing to pay the less quantity with higher price

 

Step 3, Confirm price

 

At this step, you need to confirm a lot of things with supplies like the price, the purchasing quantity,cost for packaging, if it has,and also the shipping costs for different shipping solution. if you don’t have your own freight forwarder, here is the very important thing is that what trade term should your supplier quote you?fob, Ex-works,CIF or what else. i’m not going to explain the importance in this article. so there’s should remember my conclusion, if you have your own freight forwarder that have someone who can help you ship product from China, then just let your supplier quote you FOB price.And your supplier will be responsible for all the costs that deliver to the vessel at the seaport or aircraft at the airport, and they will also pay all costs for exporting.If you don’t have a freight forwarder, then just let you supplier quote you the product price in the Ex-works and then let them quote you the shipping costs separately, which covers from the supplier’s warehouse all the way to your destination.You always need to confirm the shipping cost and the shipping solutions with supplies before your place order.

 

Step 4, Get sample.

 

Before you choose the final supplier to place the order, you must to get the product sample to confirm the quality,and you can not just judge the quality by the supplies photo or images,you have to get it and to touch and feel it. And then you need to reconfirm with the supplier, that the quality of the bulk order should be the same as the sample,otherwise，you will have the risk to receive the quality in the bulk order is not as good as the sample. I recommend you to get the samples from to two or three suppliers. and if any one of them didn’t offer a good quality, you can still have other supplies as the backup solution, getting simple, usually costs around USD30 because the main cos is the express shipping by fedex or dhl, and you will usually receive like three days.But it’s really very worth to invest this small money and time.

 

Step 5, place order.

 

After you confirm with the supplier for the product price, simple quality, purchasing quantity and the lead time,you can place order now,supplier will create and send you invoice. and you need to pay 30% as deposit, and they start production, and then you need to pay 70% balance before the product shipping out of china. I have mentioned in section one that the alibaba trade assurance service is very recommended because it can ensure the product quality is the same as what you expected. it’s very simple,you can create the trade assurance order by yourself or ask your supplier to create for you, and then just follow alibaba’s instruction and send the money to alibaba account, then they will help you to hold the money until you receive your products. If your supplier don’t accept trade assurance, but you can not find other supplies who can offer a better price,quality or better qualification in other aspects. But you believe your supplier is very trustworthy. then you need to use the wire transfer to send the money directly to their bank account.For wiring money to china. Except for going to bank,you can also choose some transfer website like veem or transferwise, because there are easier, faster and cheaper than bank.

Step 6 Inspect quality.

 

After the massive product is finished, you need to inspect the quality and then pay the balance to the supplier to get the product ship to you. Don’t think your product should be fine, as long as your use the trade assurance, and you need to be very careful all the time, because you don’t want to receive the defect products. and open the dispute to get the competition is always not very good result, because you are wasting time and money. The simplest way is to let your supplier send your high resolution product photos or videos, and you can check if the color or size is the same according to your requirement. I strongly recommend you to ask supplier to send you a sample from the bulk order to check quality, even though it will spend around thirty dollars for the international expert fee. but it’s very worthy, you can also have a third party inspection companies like. SGS,QIMA or V-trust,and they’ll let their people who travel to the supplies warehouse to inspect quality, and usually they need to like around USD300 for one person one day for the inspection. And then you will receive a very detailed inspection report, and it will include, if all the quantity, product size, measurement colors or functions, all of match your requirements. if you think USD300 is too expensive, you can also use the quality inspection service on Alibaba, and it only need USD100. But i prefer to call it mni inspection, because it’s cheap, and they can not spend that much time for inspection, because for what famous in inspection companies like. Bureau Veritas, their charge is very expensive for a whole-day inspection.

 

Step 7, Shipping products.

 

Final, you are at the last step of the whole process. then you need to your supplier to assist you to ship products from china all the way to your home, home furniture to your country. if you you are amazon seller, then you need to ship products from china all the way to amazon fulfillment centers. If you don’t have own freight forwarders, i recommend you to ask the supplier to help find one,and they will help arrange the shipping and import and expert process, and you just pay all the cost to the supplier. There are three kinds of shipping methods, courier service,sea freight and air freight.

 

For courier service, it is the most expensive, and there are provided by companies likeFedex,DHL and TNT, and for most countries. you will receive the products in three to five days. You will get the tracking code after the supplier shipping the product, and you can go to this courier’s website to check the location of your products.

 

For sea freight or air freight, there is no way to check the shipment status, so we can only ask you the supplier or ask your own freight forwarder to know when the product will be arrived at the port,and when it will be delivered.

 

I hope it can help you a lot, Please leave comment or feel free contact us if you have any question or something not clear,or something that you want to learn more. and i will re reply or create a new article to help you understand better.

 

While foreign trade people are tirelessly seeking advice on how to find a list of buyers, foreigners are also racking their brains to find reliable suppliers.

In the eyes of foreigners, Alibaba is a place where countless products are waiting to be sourced at prices they wouldn’t even think of. They can find a bunch of products in Alibaba at prices that are beyond their expectations. They can even customise anything they want to produce and sell here.

I went up there and saw that there are really quite a few tutorials in this category!

Of course, foreign sellers have a lot to worry about when it comes to finding suppliers on Alibaba!

 

So finding trustworthy Chinese sellers has become a discipline that foreigners want to master. Take a look at what foreigners look for in a supplier on Alibaba!

The first step for a foreigner who wants to find a reliable supplier on Alibaba is of course to create an Alibaba account, and these foreigners take care to register using a separate Gmail account.

Foreigners are afraid of being scammed! So when they are looking for suppliers, they are screened for genuine and reliable sellers. This is why the “Gold Supplier” and “Gold Supplier” thresholds are the yardsticks by which foreigners judge the trustworthiness of companies. Gold Supplier” is a paid member who has been checked for quality assurance.

 

In English, “Gold Supplier” means “Assessed Supplier”, which is almost the same as “Gold Supplier”, but in a higher class.

A Gold Supplier is a company that has undergone quality checks and whose company has been thoroughly vetted to ensure its legitimacy. Suppliers who have checked both “Gold Suppliers” and “Assessed Supplier” are generally very credible.

However, even this is not enough to take it lightly. After all, online shopping is as deep as the sea. Therefore, when it comes to payment methods, foreigners do not use Paypal if they can use credit cards, and do not consider any other payment methods if they can use Paypal.

Selecting suppliers
After the first round of screening, foreigners will look at the supplier information on the right hand side of the page

YRS Icon: how long the supplier has been in business, the longer the better

Location: the location of the supplier, usually the best price is for products based in China

Transaction Level: The number of transactions the seller has made over the years. The more orders a supplier has, the more trustworthy they are.

Supplier Assessments

Response Time: The average response time of a supplier

Response Rate: The rate at which a supplier responds to a message. This is the percentage of 100 messages that a supplier responds to.

After checking some of the above information, it is time to contact the supplier and send the enquiry. Here are two inquires written by foreigners.

Hi there,

We’re a [niche] distributor selling products within the United States. We’re interested in adding

to our product lineup, and thought your products looked great!

My boss would like me to order 10 sample sets/units of this product.

My boss would also like you to use your express shipping account.

Let me know what else you need from me to get this sample order shipped!

Look forward to working with you,

Look forward to working with you, [Your Name]
Purchasing Agent for [business name]

Or it could be written like this.

“My name is [xxx] from [xxx]. Our company director asked me to contact your company about working together on a lucrative, long-term venture. We are a company that sells products related to [industry] and we do over 2 million dollars in sales each year. We’re looking to expand our product range and create a profitable partnership between your company and ours.

We are planning to purchase [item] to our product line. It would need to meet these specifications: * Specification (e.g size) * Specification (e.g. quantity) * Specification (e.g. colour) We have been researching different companies in China that manufacture We have been researching different companies in China that manufacture [item] and we think that your company could be a great supplier for it.

We would like to get some more information and have a few questions that we would like you to please answer: Can we please get a Can you please let us know how much you will charge for the sample, including Express shipping to [country], zip code [code]? How long will it take to receive the sample? What types of packaging do you usually use for this product? How long does it take to manufacture once an order has been placed? What is the product-per-unit cost including shipping What is the product-per-unit cost including shipping via Air Express to the United States, ZIP code 85043?

We would be very grateful if you would contact us with answers to the above questions as well as any additional policies that we may need to know. We would also like to discuss with you further about doing a sample order for the product. Please add me on Skype and talk to me, as this is my ideal form of communication: [INSERT ID] Alternatively you can email me back at this address: [I ADDRESS]

Kind regards, [NAME]”

Here are a few things that foreigners will be aware of when contacting suppliers.

Claim that you are an employee of the company, not the owner, to facilitate a good relationship and subsequent cooperation

Then the foreigner will usually ask the supplier for a sample, saying that he wants to see if there is a local market for the goods. If the supplier doesn’t agree, it’s over.

Many foreigners do not use their real names

They will send enquiries to several suppliers at the same time

So, where else do foreigners go to find suppliers besides Alibaba?

First, of course, at exhibitions.

As with sourcing, foreigners also value exhibitions as a way of finding suppliers. After all, the authenticity is high. Many foreigners choose to come directly to China to participate in exhibitions, such as the Canton Fair, Zhejiang Yiwu Small Commodity Fair and the East China Import and Export Commodity Fair, which are all relatively well-known exhibitions abroad. For the US, you can check the M+Expodatabase website. It’s a website dedicated to checking exhibitions.

Then you can also search on Google or Facebook. Also, you can join some Facebook communities where many foreigners look for suppliers, but many of them require questions to be answered for verification.

 

In addition, SaleHoo is a directory for suppliers abroad.

SaleHoo is officially vetted, so trust is guaranteed.

 

Online trading site eTradeAsia.com

This website is also one of the world’s largest online trading portals. It has 700,000 members and millions of products. It is a relatively niche site, but foreigners will often look for suppliers here.
LightintheBox.com for lifestyle products
The products on this site are sourced directly from suppliers. It is a global online retail platform specialising in clothing and accessories as well as furniture and gardening products. Although it is not an official supplier directory, there are many contact details of suppliers that foreigners will find here.

MFG.com
MFG.com is known as “the eBay of manufacturing”. It can be considered as a global database of manufacturing companies. However, the site only focuses on heavy machinery products. Such as gears, moulds and parts. The site is funded by Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, and is basically very credible.

 

Finally, we also recommend a few more geographically specific websites.

India’s Indiamart.com is a website focused on clothing supply, similar to alibaba and Aliexpress, only smaller, but you can also find many suppliers.

Sqetch.co.com, based in the Netherlands. There are already over 1000 suppliers and manufacturers on the site.

The Makersrow network in the USA, which directly connects clothing designers with small and medium-sized factories. Mainly some local US manufacturers and suppliers.