The quality of your questions determines the quality of the result. If you ask the wrong questions, it will make your supplier doubt your willingness to cooperate and your knowledge of this product . As a result, you may have difficulty finding the best supplier. In this article, I will tell you how to ask your potential suppliers to help you find the best supplier.

Top Questions to Ask Your New Suppliers

Asking as many questions as possible is not the best, as this can lead to you wasting a lot of time with the wrong supplier. Here are some questions you can ask to determine if it’s your potential supplier.

Are You A Trading Company or A Manufacturer?

It’s ok to work with a trading company or a manufacturer, it’s important to know who you’re working with. Since working with both trading companies and manufacturers has advantages and disadvantages. For example, you can get a better price when cooperating with a manufacturer while you can get a diversity of products when buying from a trading company, you need to choose according to your own requirements.

What’s Your Company Size?

You can ask your supplier by how many employees in your company or how many workers, production lines in your factory to get an idea of the scale of the supplier to see whether its production output can meet your needs. If your order is not large, a smaller supplier may be a better fit, because large suppliers may not mind small orders.

Which Are Your Main Products? Have Your Ever Produced My Products?

This can help you determine whether they can produce the product you want. If their main product is similar to your product or they have produced the product you want, they can become potential suppliers.

What Are Your Main Markets?

You need to ask your suppliers what their major overseas markets are. If suppliers export most of their products to North America and Western Europe, that’s a good sign. This means that their products meet the health and safety standards of those regions and that they are familiar with exporting to and dealing with foreign customers in those regions. But if the main markets are domestic, in Central America or Africa, those markets tend to have lower quality health and safety standards. You can use this as an early indication of the quality of a supplier’s product.

Do You Supply Any Products Sold on Amazon?

If the suppliers do supply products sold on Amazon, then it means they will understand FBA and the packaging requirements. They are also familiar with the business mode on Amazon and will certainly know how to help you avoid being penalized by Amazon. If not, it’s also not a bad thing since you may have less competitors. Of course, depending on your needs, finding an experienced vendor can save you a lot of trouble if you’re not familiar with Amazon.

Do You Assist Customers in Quality Inspection?

This is a sign of their confidence in their product, as many suppliers boast about the quality of their products but are reluctant to cooperate with third-party inspection.

Can You Provide the Copy of Your Certificates?

It can help you check whether the supplier has the certain certificates you want. And you can also take the chance to verify the authenticity of the certificates provided by the supplier because our customers have been cheated by fake certificates. If you want to know more about this, you can refer to this article: https://sinoinspection.com/exaggerations-lies-fake-licenses-chinese-suppliers/.

What’s the Next Step?

Of course, only asking the above questions is not enough to help you find the best supplier. It is just to make sure that there is a need to know more about the supplier. If so, you need to have a deeper understanding of the product quality and background of the supplier.

Order Samples

You can order samples to check the product quality. The quality of the product is an important factor you can’t ignore when choosing a supplier. Keep in mind that you may have to pay for poor quality products in the end.

Conduct A Background Check

You can hire a third-party agent to help you verify the company to see if it has bad credit records or not. And if your supplier is a manufacturer, you can conduct a factory audit to test the production capacity.

Then you can communicate with your supplier for more detailed information such as lead time, payment term and so on.

Conclusion

When asking questions, the key is quality, not quantity. Ask a small number of questions to determine whether there are potential suppliers. Too many questions can also make your suppliers doubt your cooperation or lose patience. If you need any help in finding a reliable supplier in China, you can contact us for help.