Importing from China presents businesses both big and small with an outstanding opportunity to greatly increase profit margins and still offer fantastic products at prices consumers are anxious to pay. The big guys might buy massive amounts of products at incredibly lower prices for the mass markets but there are phenomenal opportunities for small and medium size business to make fantastic buys of smaller quantities that still bring huge profits.
This eBook assumes that your company is a small or medium size importer with an established customer base in your home country or a company wanting to start with their own importing but lacking the experience to do so. The biggest and best reason for starting an import business or increasing your import volume is to improve your company’s overall profit margin.
China – The Great Factory
China is fast becoming a production super power, manufacturing a hefty proportion of the world’s consumer products. It is often called the factory to the world. Because the Chinese economy is in a growth period, cost of manufacturing is very low compared to elsewhere in the world. This presents a fantastic opportunity to you as a seller. By sourcing your merchandise directly from China, you are able to get extremely low prices per unit and turning them around for a hefty profit in your own country.
What Not to Import
As already mentioned in the eBook extract on our website, you need to spend substantial time to evaluate your home market for suitable products, which are in demand or will be in demand and the customers who want to buy them. As an importer and retailer, you know the first rule to success is knowing your customer(s) and what they will pay handsomely for.
If you only follow what your competitors are already pursuing, you will end up importing too many “Me Too” products. Too much competition drives your profits down. The real China importing opportunity is the right product at rock bottom prices. Therefore, by all means, avoid looking for products that are already being imported by large buying organizations like retail chain stores, department stores or specialized importers with their own distribution channels. It will prove too difficult for you to compete with their buying power and their own buying offices in China.
The general process is to first select a product for import, negotiate a contract with the manufacturer, wait for the product to be manufactured, and then wait for it to be delivered by ship. It may take months for your products to reach your warehouse. A forward thinking strategy is essential to avoid piling up goods, which upon arrival, nobody wants anymore.
Beginning the Product Selection
Looking out for trends can be very time consuming because you need to know where to start. However, there is as shortcut that can save you valuable time. The program is called “Trend Cockpit”. You can download it from the internet by following this link:
http://www.tradebit.com/filedetail.php/126198394-trend-cockpit-software.
This program is amazing because it allows you to use a cockpit to log on to trendsetters like Amazon, eBay, Google, YouTube, etc., unquestionably the largest retailers on the Internet. Altogether, there are 34 different web addresses for tracking trends. It is a heavy program of 200MB but it’s worth downloading because you will also receive a 45 minute video explaining in detail how to use the program and where to find the latest trends.
Trendy products allow you to pull in huge profits when you are among the first importing them to your home country. The key is moving fast, otherwise the selected products are already out of fashion.
The market frequently changes and products which you sold for a couple of years, a decade ago, now may have a life cycle no longer than 8 months or so. This also explains why you must go and visit Chinese manufacturers more frequently to avoid missing the latest developments. You need to know in advance what’s in the pipeline and who else other than the manufactures can tell you.