Receiving an order is the happiest thing for a foreign trade salesperson, but this is just the beginning. Not every order can be paid and delivered at the same time. If you don’t control customer risks, you may lose both money and goods!
There are many types of customer risks, such as the bankruptcy of the customer company, encountering a fraudulent company, the interruption of the customer company’s cash flow, and the customer deliberately not accepting the goods to force the supplier to reduce the price.
To deal with customer risks, you first need to investigate the background of the customer company.
You can use Google satellite maps to query the address of the customer company to confirm whether the customer company really exists and the size of the company’s building. You can also check the customer company’s website to understand the customer company’s establishment time, company background, and what projects it has done. You can also use social networks such as Google to check how many employees the customer company has in order to judge the strength and scale of the customer company. You can also use Google to search whether the customer company has serious negative news and serious debt problems, whether the customer company has a record of deceiving Chinese suppliers, and whether it has been exposed by domestic and foreign media to prevent the risk of customer default.
If it is an old customer, observe whether there is any abnormal behavior based on the old customer’s order habits. For example, the previous orders were all $500,000 each, and the payment method was to pay the balance before delivery. Now the order has suddenly increased to $2 million each, and the payment method requires the balance to be paid 30 days after arrival. In this case, you must be vigilant and find out why the customer company suddenly increased the order amount by 3 times and changed the payment method. Is it because the customer company has insufficient cash flow, is the customer company expanding, or is it preparing to defraud a large sum of money? Some issues need to be communicated and confirmed with the customer, and some issues require hiring a local third-party personnel to go to the customer company to actually understand the situation to ensure that there is no risk.