How to know a reliable supplier for importation business

Who is a reliable supplier from Alibaba, Aliexpress, 1688, Tmall, Amazon? I made a lot of mistake trying to import things in the early days which was part of my learning curve. But you are not going to make same mistakes because you have this resource.

Watch video below:

1. A reliable supplier must have inventory or stock
2. A reliable supplier must be customer friendly
3. A reliable supplier must have a history of always shipping the products he advertised as it is on the website
4. A reliable supplier must be able to ship as fast as possible.
5. A reliable supplier must not be fraudulent.

So these are the 5 things you must look out for in a supplier. But in Alibaba.com or Aliexpress.com you have thousands of suppliers, how can you sieve out the good guys you can do business with, even without meeting them or visiting their store?

This is where you will have to do your homework using the tips I will show you in this guide. As a matter of fact, the most important work of the business person is not raising capital but sourcing the right product from the right supplier. Note that you are going to spend lots of hours looking for the right supplier but with the tips I will show you, you can do it under an hour.

• How to know the right supplier:

You do not go out there searching for suppliers. You search for products and you will get thousands of them in your search results from different suppliers. Now in as much as the product is important, the supplier is even more important.

Here are the things to look out for in selecting the right supplier:

We will use the picture below as our primary reference. In this picture, I chose to search for camera drone and I got lots of results. Which of the suppliers (not product now!) should I choose from?

• Supplier star ratings: The supplier star rating on a product is the average of the customer ratings of that particular product. I mean customers that actually paid for that product and not random users. Ratings are out of 5. Before you place order, I recommend you choose 4.5 – 5 star rating. Worst still do not go below 4 star rating. I repeat, do not buy any product with less than 5 star rating. From the picture above, you can see that the 4 products from 3 different suppliers are all at least 4.5/5.0 ratings so they are all good to go. But is that all?
• Number of items sold: Now you will have to identify the number of items sold. Star ratings are not completely reliable. For example, a good supplier and a good product that just published the product and sold to 2 persons, with 1 customer giving a one star review and the other giving a 5 star review will have average review of 2.5. This will not be a true reflection of the product until you get over 100 people to actually try out the product.Also the number of items sold may reflect the quality of the product. If a particular product has very high sales count, it may most likely be because not just that the product is of good quality, and the seller is also good in what she is doing. A lot of factors affect the number of products sold but you should feel safe knowing that a lot of people has actually bought and used this particular product with high sales count.So in the picture above, you’ll find out that while the first three products has sold under 400 pieces which is good, the other one has sold 13,709! Also with this huge number, the 4.5 star rating is more reliable than the 5 star rating of a smaller sales count.As a general rule, I recommend that beginners purchase only goods with at least 100 sold products with at least 4 star rating.
• Seller badge: Alibaba websites usually reward highly performing suppliers with badges. These badges show the trustworthiness of the supplier. Aliexpress for example just introduced the “Top brand badge”. According to the website,

Top Brands are top-rated stores on AliExpress. When you’re shopping at these stores, you’re either directly buying from the brand itself or from an authorized reseller.

For example let’s go back to our camera drone products. Let’s click on the Eachine store that sold 13,709 of its products and see what Aliexpress thinks of the store.

Interestingly, it has the top brands badge as seen in the picture below.

We will come back to the other highlighted information above.

But let’s check Alibaba too.

I will search for Camera Drones too and here is a part of my result in the picture below. If you zoom in to the picture, you will notice that all the suppliers have good ratings. This means you can safely purchase from any of the stores. A further observation reveals that only the last two suppliers have the blue verified tick.

Alibaba contracts a multinational Swiss group founded in 1878 known as SGS to verify its suppliers. SGS describes herself as

“The world’s leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company, and is recognized as the global benchmark for quality and integrity.”

Other Alibaba Verification agencies are: Bureau Veritas, TUV SUD, TÜV Rheinland Group, and Intertek.

Below is some of the badges and ratings you will see in Alibaba and I will show you their level of importance:

• Star rating: Rated over 5. Like in Aliexpress, I strongly recommend you purchase goods with 4.5 stars and above or at least 4 stars. Alibaba rates suppliers on: Supplier service, on time delivery and Product quality. Go through this rating before placing your order.
• Verified supplier: According to Alibaba,
  A Verified Supplier is a supplier for whom certain aspects of its company profile, management system, production capabilities, and product and process controls have been assessed, certified and/or inspected by independent third party institutions via online and offline means.

As explained before, but note that this gives additional reason to trust a supplier but it’s not very compulsory that a seller must have this badge. Feel free to purchase from suppliers without it.

• Gold supplier: In as much as Alibaba sellers pay some money to become Gold suppliers, I take it very serious and I buy only from Gold suppliers. Gold suppliers many times turn out to be very serious with their business and most times they are big businesses.
• Trade Assurance: I advise you to buy only from stores that have the Trade Assurance badge. I think is the most important badge in Alibaba: Trade assurance. Suppliers with this badge will allow you pay through Alibaba platform your money will be put in escrow until you confirm you received goods in good condition and as described. If there is any issue, Alibaba will withhold your money, help resolve it or refund you immediately. Please do not order from stores without Trade Assurance, it’s very dangerous to do that! I have paid for an item before and it was never delivered to me.

The seller insisted he actually shipped the goods. He might be right but I never received it and Alibaba refunded me in clear funds. It is up to the supplier to query and follow up with the logistics company, not you. Some Chinese business people are fraudulent too. This Trade Assurance will clearly protect you. For clarity sake, this is what Trade assurance badge look like, see picture below:

• Transaction Level: This is the orange diamond icon that indicates the transaction volume of the supplier. This is an important indicator of how big the supplier is. Below will guide you in interpreting Alibaba Transaction Level icons when you see it:

So these are the major indicators to how serious a seller is before you place your order.