Intruduction

We all make mistakes, but what matters is how much we need to pay for them. When importing from China, you may make some sourcing mistakes that cost you more money. Usually, you have invested a lot in the purchasing process, and you can’t make mistakes to cost you more money. In this article, I will tell you 7 costly sourcing mistakes and how to avoid them.

7 Costly Sourcing Mistakes & Solutions

Following are the sourcing mistakes you may make and the solutions to take.

Mistake 1: Not Checking the Market

Before carrying out sourcing plans, you haven’t conducted market research on your product, so you can’t determine whether it has market prospects or not. At the same time, the lack of analysis on competitors may lead to no competitive advantages among the same products. As a result, even if you can successfully import from China, your product may be unmarketable and incur huge losses.

Solution

• Do market research before sourcing target product.
• Collect and analyze competitors’ prices and advantages.

Mistake 2: Not Verifying Your Supplier

Blindly trusting suppliers and making payments without checking their background. For example, a real case from one of our visitors on our website, the importer didn’t conduct a company background check before cooperation and was cheated by a dishonest supplier.

Actually, after receiving his messages, we verified this company and found the company had been cancelled at that time, that is to say, he was scammed and lost his money.

Solution

• Find a third-party agent like SinoInspection to help you verify your potential suppliers.

Mistake 3: Not Calculating the Landed Cost

The product prices on the market are very transparent, and customers can easily compare them. What you need to do is to calculate your total landed cost, so that you can have a bottom line for how much you can sell without losing money. Anything more than that floor price is profit. The quote from your supplier is not the total landed cost, you need to add all cost elements together.

Solution

• Calculate your landed cost correctly and you can refer to this article: Import from China Tutorial 06: How to Calculate Your Cost | SinoInspection.com

Mistake 4: Not Negotiating for A Better Price

Underestimating the power of a penny. When negotiating a price with a supplier, you may think that a penny is small and insignificant, but when multiplied by 100,000, a million or more, that penny can become a very expensive mistake. That could be a cost you can save by renegotiating with your supplier.

Solution

• Don’t pass up any opportunity to negotiate a better price with your supplier.
• Refer to this article for more price negotiation tactics: A Guide on Negotiating Price with Your Chinese Supplier | SinoInspection.com

Mistake 5 : Blaming Your Supplier Only

Choosing a good supplier is as important as choosing a good product. When you choose a good product, at least there is no money involved. Thousands of dollars are at stake when you choose a supplier. Even if there is a problem, do not just blame the supplier, you need to negotiate with the supplier to solve the problem together since relationship is very important in China. If you establish a good relationship with your supplier, your sourcing process will be smoother.

Solution

• Build a good relationship with your supplier to prevent the supplier costing you thousands of dollars.

Mistake 6: Indecision

The market changes, opportunities will slip away, the market and opportunity never wait for the indecisive person. Do it when you’re ready. Don’t put it off for three or six months since you may miss out on a great moneymaking opportunity.

Solution

• Take actions immediately. And if you are a newbie, you can ask a sourcing agent to help you for your first importation.

Mistake 7: No Pre-shipment Quality Inspection

In order to save costs, some importers will skip the quality inspection process, but may suffer more losses. For example:

These two importers have been taken advantage of by suppliers and suffered losses because they did not carry out pre-shipment inspection.

Solution

• Quality inspection can’t be missed. Conduct pre-shipment inspection on your products at least once.

Summary

Avoid making the 7 costly mistakes mentioned above , which can help you get more profits. If you want to know more information about how to sourcing from China, please feel to contact us.