After determining the product you want to create, the next step is to choose a suitable product supplier to place an order. There are usually two ways to find sources of goods, offline and online. The offline method is more traditional, that is, participating in industry exhibitions or going directly to related industrial belts to find factories; the online method is relatively convenient. If the purchase volume is not large, it is recommended to find suppliers on Alibaba 1688. Whether it is offline or online, we need to have a set of standards when selecting suppliers. What are the reference standards for supplier selection?
1. Professional
The products produced are professional enough to meet valuable differentiation requirements. The supplier can explain the market reasons and technical reasons for product design, and the product represents future development trends and consumer needs.
2. E-commerce background
Understand the “small quantity and multiple batches” procurement needs of cross-border e-commerce sellers, and be willing to cooperate in packaging improvement and logistics distribution, and be willing to cooperate with cross-border e-commerce sellers.
3. Willingness to improve
Be passionate about product innovation and improvement, and be willing to work with sellers to improve products.
4. Product layout
The product category is rich and the layout is reasonable, which helps sellers to form product serialization and branding.
5. Growth background
If it is a small factory, the boss’s growth background is very important. Bosses with technical or engineering backgrounds are more willing to invest in product technology and product innovation; bosses with marketing backgrounds may be better at consumer demand and market research. Avoid cooperating with factories that do not strictly control product quality and pursue short-term profits. After finding a suitable product supplier, the subsequent procurement process is very simple. After all, you only need to purchase a few products from a supplier in large quantities. In addition, after long-term cooperation, we can also talk to suppliers about the account period or joint operation to further alleviate financial pressure.
After talking about the supplier screening and procurement methods of FBA sellers who mainly use the boutique model, let’s take a look at the supplier screening and procurement methods of FBM (self-delivery) sellers. For Amazon FBM sellers, product suppliers are relatively easy to screen, and there is no need to set as many screening conditions as FBA sellers.
In contrast to FBA sellers, the biggest problem faced by FBM sellers is procurement, because orders placed every day come from different suppliers. FBM sellers have at least thousands of suppliers on Alibaba 1688, and basically need to find these thousands of suppliers for procurement every day, purchasing an average of 3 to 5 products from each supplier. If the entire procurement process is done manually, it is simply unimaginable.