Chapter 2: Evaluate Supplier

With so many suppliers for you to choose from, you must be puzzled how to identify a supplier as a reliable partner.

A good supplier is an important factor for business success.

Let me tell you some important factors that you should not ignore.

Legality

It is very important to confirm that the supplier is a legally registered company in China.

It is worth noting that many Chinese suppliers will register Hong Kong companies to attract customers.

From the name, these suppliers are strong and large-scale, but in fact they may be a shell company.

Reliability

Unreliable suppliers may bring a series of problems to your order, such as delivering low-quality products, not delivering goods on the agreed time, and not actively handling problems for you, etc.

Therefore, you should try to consider the reliability of this supplier from many aspects before cooperating.

The reliability of the supplier can be reflected in many aspects.

For example, the history of the supplier, the scale of the supplier, and the supplier’s credit information.

The most important thing is whether the information provided by the supplier is true in your communication with it.

Supplier Type

Suppliers can basically be divided into two types.

• The manufacturer of the product
• A trading company that earns the difference between the manufacturer and the buyer

Most suppliers on the Internet claims to be a manufacturer.

Because if they tell their customers that they are a trading company, they are likely to lose the order.

While teaming up with a trading company is not without benefits, it is clearly the cheapest option to cooperate with manufacturers. Customers come to China to buy goods to save money.

FURTHER READING

• How To Choose Factory & trading Company When Import From China
• How To Find The Best Supplier in China For Smallbusiness?

According to our experience and investigation, most suppliers of the B2B platforms are trading companies, and only about 10%-20% of the suppliers are real factories.

This makes it difficult for overseas buyers to find genuine manufacturers of goods.

So if you want to cooperate with manufacturers to obtain better prices, it is important to audit the supplier type before further cooperation.

This is the greatest value of our free supplier audit service.

History, Scale and Strength

If the supplier has focused on the same product category for a relatively long time, for example, more than 3 years, it means that the supplier has rich experience in the supply of this product.

Check the supplier’s resources. Are they capable of fulfilling your order?

These resources may include personnel, equipment, warehouses, and so on.

Product Compliance

Whether the supplier has the relevant product certificate is also an important factor.

Especially for some specific products, such as electronic products and toys.

Many customs have strict requirements for importing these products. And some e-commerce platforms will also make some requirements for allowing you to sell on them.

The above are the supplier factors that any buyer should consider when importing from China.

In addition, depending on the needs of each buyer, other aspects of the supplier may need to be evaluated.

You can investigate by yourself and then evaluate the supplier from the above aspects or use the SourcingArts supplier checker to directly obtain the Supplier Verification Report.