Suppose your company just get a brand license and need to develop a totally new product range, how to find the correct suppliers in a short time and then start a successful business.

The purchasing assistant will search “Best China Manufacturer” on Google, but there’re thousands of results.

Your buyer knows well about B2B websites, from where you can have a quick response, but do you ever think about how the company is working behind the website.

Your team has the schedule to China twice or more times to attend the trade shows, do you know how the manufacturers who have attended the fair for 12 times, continuously for 6 years feel against the rise of Electronic Commerce.

Here’re 10 tips that you never learn according to each pattern, and there’s a BIG SECRET TOOL that you can get manufacturer cost without asking anybody.

Knowing the cost, it will be very efficiently and effectively to negotiate with new suppliers, which helps a lot to narrow down which is the most suitable suppliers for you.

China as a world-wide factory, it develops a lot of B2B websites which provide an easy way to connect manufacturers and buyers easily. I list out the largest and most useful ones for the buyers.

Here I take ‘Car Vacuum Cleaner’ as an example product and help to analyze the things you don’t know. (All the companies mentioned in this article have no commercial purpose. )

1. Alibaba

Alibaba is the No. 1 B2B website and helps 120 thousand medium and small enterprises to have a platform with foreign buyers and make business easier. I’m sure you already have this skill and a lot of experience with it. Let’s search “Car Vacuum Cleaner” directly and see how is the result, and I will tell something useful behind it at the manufacturer’s side.

China as a world-wide factory, it develops a lot of B2B websites which provide an easy way to connect manufacturers and buyers easily. I list out the largest and most useful ones for the buyers. Here I take ‘Car Vacuum Cleaner’ as an example product and help to analyze their advantages and disadvantages (All the companies mentioned in this article have no commercial purpose. )
1.Alibaba
1)3 pictures above you look at the green rectangle circles. Every single keyword has only one Top Sponsored Listing and several Sponsored Listing which cost the company $3,000- $5,000 one year depends on different keyword or product. No one knows who will be the Top Sponsored next year, this cost is not a small budget for only one keyword.
Behind it: the sponsored listing is only valid for 1 year and renewal fee will be much higher if it has very big sales in this keyword.
2)You can see their establish years of these top 5 companies are mostly 1 year or 2 years, only one has 6 years. Alibaba is a 20-year company and the first group companies who earned a lot of money in Alibaba are all over 10 years. Who pays more money to Ali, they can rank on the first page. The old suppliers who already have stable business are focusing more on long term business, no longer beating hard to take market shares, while the new manufacturers are doing this crazily.
The basic fee of Ali is ￥29,800 = $4,500, new factories pay for extra service like P4P and generally spend $8,000 annually.
Behind it: a) new fresh companies receive orders at a very low profit, which in turn has an influence in product quality and service.
B)It’s hard to find the old & excellent suppliers or they are already zero out of Ali.Alibaba is the No. 1 B2B website and helps 120 thousand medium and small enterprises to have a platform with foreign buyers and make business easier. I’m sure you already have this skill and a lot of experience with it. Let’s search “Car Vacuum Cleaner” directly and see how is the result, and I will tell something useful behind it at the manufacturer’s side.

• 1) 3 pictures above you look at the green rectangle circles. Every single keyword has only one Top Sponsored Listing and several Sponsored Listing which cost the company $3,000- $5,000 one year depends on different keyword or product. No one knows who will be the Top Sponsored next year, this cost is not a small budget for only one keyword.
  Behind it: the sponsored listing is only valid for 1 year and renewal fee will be much higher if it has very big sales in this keyword.
• 2) You can see their establish years of these top 5 companies are mostly 1 year or 2 years, only one has 6 years. Alibaba is a 20-year company and the first group companies who earned a lot of money in Alibaba are all over 10 years. Who pays more money to Ali, they can rank on the first page.
  Behind it: new fresh companies receive orders at a very low profit, which in turn has an influence in product quality and service.
• 3) The old suppliers who already have stable business are focusing more on long term business, no longer beating hard to take market shares, while the new manufacturers are doing this crazily.
  The basic fee of Ali is ￥29,800 = $4,500, new factories pay for extra service like P4P and generally spend $8,000 annually.
  Behind it: It’s hard to find the old & excellent suppliers or they are already zero out of Ali.

2. Global Sources

It’s mainly for Electronics, Lifestyle, Hardware and Fashion product as shown on its homepage.

As I search “Car Vacuum Cleaner”, there’re only 10 suppliers which is much less than I thought, while in Ali there are 15 pages, 38 suppliers each page. The reason why so less member is the high annual fee, from $6,000 to $56,000 from 1-star service to 6-star service. You can understand only the very large company can cover the cost and renew year by year. They’re usually 4-star or 6-star service, 15+ years.

But one of their specialty is that they hold their own trade show every year in Hongkong. You can find their trade show history from the home page. If you’re looking for Electronics or Gifts, you can visit it and try to send some inquiry.

3. Made-in-China

MIC has two kinds of the member, golden member $5,000 per year, diamond member $7,500 per year. I search the supplier list and find only 1 factory who produces “car vacuum cleaner” in the first 5 pages, all the others named as Yuyao xxx are SOHO which is never heard before.
If you’re looking for machines, you may use MIC and ask for an inquiry.

4. 1688 – review this website and get the correct cost of China Suppliers

1688 is a Chinese website under Alibaba, which operates the wholesale business in China. I won’t tell you that it has a lot of useful and real information which you can also learn from. If you know some Chinese or you’re good at translation tool, you can do this job very well. Let’s do as follows.

1) Search English name “car vacuum cleaner”, in the results you can see its corresponding Chinese name
2)
3) Copy the Chinese name and search the supplier.

4) Here comes the supplier information, year, main product.
5) The most important is that it shows the exact product cost, just not including tax, and freight cost. No need to ask anybody, you can get the exact product prices.

If you only buy small quantities of new products, take these 5 steps to check what the cost of the manufacturer is. Then go back to negotiate with the suppliers who already gave you a quotation. Only note to get rid of some agent companies which offer twice or more time price on this Chinese website.
It would be much easier if you have a translate tool. I will recommend you a plug-in LingoCloud into Chrome.
See the picture again.

GO TO TRADE SHOW

While you have potential suppliers, make a trip to visit the shows, take a close look at them.
You can’t miss the biggest trade fairs in China

5. Canton Fair

This fair held in Guangzhou, and it was established since 1957, twice per year. The Spring Canton Fair in April will be the 125th. It is the No. 1 fair in China, with the longest history and largest scale.

In the year of 2005, very few buyers came to Canton Fair, they have to pay cash as a deposit at the booth. Buyer can earn a lot of money whatever they import from China. But now it’s quite different from the development of globalization and rapid growth of E-commerce. It can’t happen again that some customer will write the order at the booth because they have too many choices, there’re lower and much lower prices.

Canton Fair after 2015

Now the biggest fair is only a place to have a meeting with the old customers, say Hi to those familiar buyers we are never able to have a chance to work with and quote to those who are not able to buy the price and quantity. The situation changes, but luckily you will get the warmest welcome from the potential suppliers. You visit their booth to know them more, checking their ability, price, and products. If you’re new to Canton Fair, please click to my another post – How to tell the company’s ability only through its Booth No.

After that, you can have a good idea of what the companies are like and take 2-3 days to check their office and factory.
So you’d better have 5-7 days for this business trip, you can decide which supplier to cooperate.

6. Automechanika SHANGHAI

This show starts since 2004, now it’s the 15th fair. It is the biggest show for Auto Parts, Electronics, Accessories, and all others. It’s quite young if compared with Canton Fair, but I start its location to analyze why you should attend this show in the near future.

Canton is in South China, it’s a great cost for those manufacturers from Shandong province, Jiangsu province and Zhejiang province – China’s four major economic provinces all the history. This show offers more opportunities for Medium or small manufacturers from these provinces. You can find very good suppliers who never attend the Canton Fair. Shanghai is the most developed city in China, there are already many buying offices, but it will increase more because the manufacturers are near here, it can reach every factory not over 3 hours by high-speed train.

7. Global Sources Electronics

This fair opens in Hongkong from April 11-14th, just before the Canton Fair. The overseas customers usually fly to Hongkong and spend one or two days in this show before the Canton Fair. There’s no offline show that can compete with Canton Fair in all aspects. They have two strong points.

• 1) They mainly develop on Electronics, they claim themselves to be the world’s largest electronics trade fair.
• 2) The manufacturers who are members of Global Sources own free booth, it’s part of their member service.

If you have already some manufacturer names, try to do some search in the engine. You will find some important information. I recommend below two.

8. Google – any information posted not in Chinese

You know Google all too well, I am not going to say something you’re too familiar with. You see this post from Google and that’s the point. More and more Chinese suppliers like me are building their independent website and promoting their service and products on Google.

We are knowing that foreign buyers will search for products, vendors, and anything on Google. It’s really a great opportunity for us. We see that, and we build the site especially for buyers, design the best style to attract them. You find the link of a vacuum cleaner, which comes from my personal website. You send an inquiry and I send a quote as all the platforms do. There could be a lot of business. Every page visitor counts and helps to grow this site, day by day.

While in the B2B platform, the pages will be zero out when stop to pay money to them no matter you’re their members for 15 years. Secondly, the suppliers in Google are usually potential suppliers because they’re much close to their customers. They offer the best service, make the quickest quotation, offer free samples, arrange airport pick-up and a factory visit. They do everything to get trust from the buyers and then start cooperation. It’s different from B2B websites.

9. Baidu – any information posted in Chinese

If you want to be a great buyer, you need to go further. Chinese people us Baidu, it’s one of the top 3 companies in China. We search for everything here. For foreign buyers, try to learn and use Baidu with a translation tool. You can have a lot of information about your potential suppliers when it was established, is there any corporate dispute.

10. Independent website – a new window for both buyers and Chinese suppliers

While the factory bosses are reviewing all the order records from paid B2B platforms, they have no choice to pay money on another member cost.

When the factory sales are updating the same products with different tile repeatedly, they know that’s no meaning but have to do.

While you are getting the BEST ever price after many bargaining during 20 factories, you may receive very low-quality products.

That’s the thing that could happen every day. A good supplier is great support of your business. It’s the same situation for a Chinese trading company, Chinese source agent. 10 manufacturers with a definite partnership can drive 2 million business easily. But before owing these 10 manufacturers, we had to go through a lot of things.

What can we do

We may know each other through a friend and start the cooperation after half a year, and then keep the long term partnership. Or to catch the ship we go to the packaging line and work together with all the workers to the midnight, from that day we built close workship. Or after several orders, we receive major quality complaints from the customer and face a large amount of compensation, we investigate the root cause and set up an improvement plan to regain the trust of our clients and minimize the loss.

After we fixed all these problems and we trust each other and we are knowing we can fix all the future issues together whatever it happens. That’s what we gain after many things, that’s the gold we show to you. If you have one of these kinds of suppliers, it’s your money and time.

Money is that we offer the best price and quality, no worry about the quality problem. You have us, we are the warranty, we’re responsible for everything. Time is that we are familiar with you, we know what time you will open the email box, which product details we have to make, what order must be early & quick delivery. It saves working time and improves efficiency. All these are just only a small part, we can fix every point which can create a totally different effect than normal suppliers.

We are a little different

For example, when you have 5 factories to visit in one day, how to make the job perfectly. With our profession and knowledge, we set out the best route and make the priorities and must-ask questions. Then go straightly to the workshop or test laboratory or showroom. Finish all 5 visits, get all the information we need, we can still have time to have a great dinner. You will stay at a nice hotel, have a good rest and then another day. That creates wealth, and that’s our goal.

If you’re looking for Auto Accessory & Automotive Tools, please visit my independent site: www.sehentools.com, I am such kind of supplier, and looking for 1-2 buyers, we can develop both businesses smoothly.

With these 10 tips, I am sure you can have a better understanding of Chinese suppliers. Hope you to find the most suitable suppliers and purchase the most correct products, that brings you as many profits as possible.