HOW TO SOURCE FOR PRODUCTS TO IMPORT – TRUSTED WEBSITES FOR MINI IMPORTATION

How can you source for your products for mini importation business? Now you must have observed that every topic we teach is extremely important. Please carefully read and do not skip any of them if you want to get the best results.

Watch the tutorial below

Talking about sourcing your product, the first question that will come to your mind is which country should you start from? Almost every country in the world has some goods that they manufacture and export to the rest of the world. Which country is the best option for your mini importation business?

China!

China is the factory of the world. Why do you think the United States engaged in trade war with China in 2019? China must be the biggest player in manufacturing and exportation for a country like USA to cry foul!

China has cheaper labor than most part of the world. They also have ecosystem of skilled labor and raw material within a short distance for the manufacturing of an item. The resultant effect of all these make goods made in China to be cheap. Cheap? You heard right. Cheap is your watch word as a mini importer. Anything other than cheap should not see your back.

3.1 Trusted websites to import from:

There are lots of websites that you can buy from. Ten years ago, most people bought from Ebay and Amazon but in this eBook, I strongly recommend you buy from websites owned by a Chinese company or better still, stick with websites owned by Alibaba group.

There are different kinds of e-commerce websites.  My definition of the terms is unique and strictly in the context of mini importation and ecommerce. They include:

• C2C websites: Customer to customer sales. This type of website caters only for small retailers selling to end users. You don’t have business with these websites as an importer.

Examples of C2C Websites:

I consider

1. Amazon.com and
2. ebay.com a good example of C2C e-commerce websites.

What is wrong with C2C e-commerce websites? They sell at an exorbitant price. This is because the sellers themselves are small retailers. Most of them have no inventory, they are only drop shippers. Drop shipping means they advertise goods from someone else’s store. They add margin and sell to you the buyer.

Also, most sellers at C2C websites like Amazon and Ebay actually buy from China and sell at a margin. So these guys are like middle men, can’t you see it? Why not skip the middle men and go to China yourself from your room? Nevertheless, please note that there are big businesses that sell wholesale on Amazon, but the majority of sellers are retailers so avoid it for now, main reason being that these sellers themselves buy from China. You can buy from China yourself.

• C2B Ecommerce websites: Customer to Business sales. I would have loved to not dwell much on this because businesses do not usually source their products from customers or retailers. Businesses do this only when the retailer has a rare product in high demand that is out of stock from the factory. My definition of these terms is unique and strictly in the context of mini importation. The majority of these websites are service websites like freelancer.com and really is not in our scope or very useful to your mini importation business at this stage.
• B2C Ecommerce websites: Business to Consumer sales. You might think this is not for you because this type of websites caters to consumers directly but this will prove to be one of the most valuable websites for you. And this is why you should take this very serious. Chinese C2B Ecommerce stores sell to everyone at a great price. Now there are sellers in China, who buy from the factory at a great deal price and they themselves add very low margin and are willing to sell to consumers around the world. These sellers sometimes are themselves the manufacturers or established businesses, hence the name B2C.

In this case, you the mini importer is classified by these sellers as the Consumer. This classification is correct because mini importers are only after doubling their money with little capital. Because your capital is small, you buy lower quantity of products unlike the big importer that buys in container load.

Advantages of B2C websites:

1. Minimum order Quantity is usually 1. This means you can actually buy one piece of an item with a very low capital.
2. You buy at a cheaper price compared to the price in your country. This is because the Chinese sellers are themselves wholesalers or manufacturers. They add very low margin to the products which makes the price similar to when you buy in bulk from the manufacturer.
3. You can see user reviews of products.
4. Good messaging system to chat or message your supplier
5. Buyer protection is available. You will be refunded if you got a wrong product shipped to you or if you never received what you ordered for, etc.

Examples of B2C Websites:

• aliexpress.com:

• 1688.com

• taobao.com

• tmall.com

Now these are the leading websites for you to choose from and the interesting thing about all of them is that they are all owned by the Alibaba group. Alibaba give you a great level of trust and protection because the Alibaba brand itself is among the global top ten brands in the world.

I personally have been using Alibaba websites since 2006.

For the purpose of this tutorial, I will stick to only www.aliexpress.com which is in English and with lots or the largest inventory to the best of my knowledge.

Translating Chinese websites into English:

If you look at the screenshots again, you will notice that apart from Aliexpress, the other websites are in Simple Chinese script. The reason is because this website is meant for primarily Chinese speakers and Chinese people. Mandarin which is the Chinese language is the most spoken language in the world with about 1.3 billion speakers. Of course you are most probably not Chinese and you will want it translated into English for you to make your purchase.

What you will do in this case is to open the websites in Google Chrome browser. Chrome has a default translate feature which I circled in blue ink above. Click on the translate button to translate the webpages into English.

• B2B Ecommerce websites: Last but not the least important is the Business to Business websites. These websites are solely or primarily into wholesale business. The sellers, all of them pose as the manufacturers of the goods and they all claim to own the factory of production. Interestingly, this is not true but you will find many factory owners and big merchants here.

You can order a container load of goods from this websites without going to China yourself and you have buyer protection to your advantage.

Examples of B2B websites includes:

• allibaba.com
• made-in-china.com
• dhgate.com
• Amazon Business

I recommend Alibaba.com for a start before you venture into the other platforms. I have already told you that Alibaba is well trusted brand and has a good protection for you the buyer.