A significant part of your preparation before attending Chinese Trade Fairs is finding and selecting products that you want to import from China and that you know will sell successfully in your home country.
China is a Big Shopping Mall
If you consider China as a large shopping mall allowing you to randomly select from all kinds of products, you are only partially correct.
You still have to do your homework weeks and months before your scheduled trip to China. You need to spend substantial time evaluating your home market for suitable products that are in demand or will be in demand and the customers who want to buy them.
If you only duplicate what your competitors are pursuing, you will end up importing too many “Me Too” products, which will drive down your profit margin. By all means, avoid looking for products that are already being imported by large buying organizations such as retail chain stores, department stores, or specialized importers with their own distribution channels.
It will prove impossibly difficult for you to compete with their buying power and their own buying offices in China.
A Forward Thinking Strategy
Since it takes months for your products to reach your warehouse after placing an order, a forward thinking strategy is essential to avoid piling up goods that nobody will want anymore, once they arrive.
Searching for new trends can be quite time consuming if you do not know where to start. Fortunately, there is a nice program available that can make your task much easier and it will save you a lot of time.
The program is called “Trend Cockpit” and you can download it from the internet at this link: http://www.tradebit.com/filedetail.php/126198394-trend-cockpit-software. This program is amazing because it uses a cockpit approach to log on to major trend setters like Amazon, eBay, Google, YouTube etc. Altogether, there are 34 different web addresses of trendsetters. It is a very large program at 200MB but it’s worth downloading because you also receive a 45 minute video explaining in detail how to use this program and where to find the latest trends.
Trends Change
Trendy products enable you to greatly increase your profit when you are among the first importing them to your home country. The biggest challenge is moving fast enough. Otherwise, the selected products are already out of trend.
The market is frequently changing. A decade ago, you could sell some products for several years. Today, products are more likely to have a life cycle as short as only 8 months or so.
This also explains why you must go and visit Chinese Trade Fairs on a regular basis. Otherwise, you will miss the newest developments. You need to know in advance what is in the pipeline and who other than the manufactures can tell you?