You are well aware that buying direct from the factory will save you money, so are thousands of people around you. Do you want to expand your business and start finding products directly from the wholesalers or even go straight to the manufacturers? Or maybe you are thinking to start your own business and being sensible about it – want to start small, keep the costs down, sell the products on TradeMe or eBay and reinvest the proceeds back to business? Great strategy! Outstanding idea!
Perhaps you aren’t sure how to go about doing that. It is a lot simpler than you might think. How do you find hot product to sell? Well it comes down to understanding what people what. Whether you want to import from China or any other country – knowing what your customers want is the most important aspect of any type of sales. Research, research and even more research… in fact 80% of your time should be spent on researching consumer patterns in the niche of your choosing! Invest your time in your own education – this investment will pay many times. You might start with attending seminars like this one: China Import Formula.
Once you have a fairly good understanding of your customer base you can begin to look at what kinds of imports to get from China. Certain items should be ruled out almost immediately because there are legal complications associated with them. For instance you can get into serious legal problems for buying and reselling items that you know are forgeries, this includes designer handbags, clothing, and because of copyright laws you can also get into trouble for selling items such as music or DVD’s. That isn’t to say that you are not still going to find a lot of great products that you can sell online. What it means is aside from understanding your customer base and the market you also have to know what you are legally able to sell. eBay has certain standards as well so researching what they will allow on their site can help you begin to understand what products are right to resell.
You can do basic research to find almost any product that you want to resell. What does your customer base want? What can they not live without, and can you get that product cheaper from China. Keep in mind that some products while they might be cheaper to buy in China can be more expensive to ship back to your home location. There are sites out there that will help you with the shipping, but working with a middle man can also cost you money. What it basically comes down to is, how much is it going to cost are you going to safe money or spend more by shipping product x back to resell it?
The next thing you need to consider if you are looking for hot products to import from China is possible scams. How do you know if you are dealing with a scam? One of the simplest ways is if the site hosting the product uses free e-mail services like GMAIL, Yahoo, or Hotmail. These sites are generally clone sites of the original product and will look simply to get your money without ever giving you any product. Honest good websites will offer up and e-mail that matches their web domain. So if you want to be successful in your online ventures beware of possible scams.
Next understands how much something costs. Say you want to sell widgets, well you should know generally speaking how much widgets costs, and how much they are worth reselling. If you do not understand this simple concept then there is a good chance you could get duped into buying a product that isn’t worth what you are paying for it, and that could eventually put you out of business.
Everyone knows that China manufactures items at a lot cheaper than say New Zealand, Australia, Europe or the United States. However, you really need to know what the product is worth otherwise you risk paying top dollar for something that you could have bought somewhere else for a lot less. Figuring this out is as simple as knowing what something is worth, and then also searching the Internet. The more research you do in the short term the more money you can end up saving in the long term.
Once you have done the necessary research and find the product that you want to sell, the next step is contacting the wholesaler and setting up an account. You should have a pretty good idea of what you want to know when it comes to talking with the wholesaler before you ever make contact. Some questions might be what kind of discounts do they give for larger purchases, or in other words how much of their product do you have to order to make it worth your while?
Some other suggestions to avoid scammers involve asking for their registration and export certificates. These will tell you whether they are a legit company or not, if they cannot provide you with that information then do not do business with them.
I would suggests requesting a small sample order, if you spent time on building relationship – you might be able to get the sample order without having to pay for shipping. This way you can test and measure the response of your target market to your ‘hot product’. Once market votes with their wallets that this product imported from China is indeed ‘hot product’ – you are on the winner – proceed with caution!
A note of caution: you should be leery of any company that insists you make a large purchase right away, even if they say it is done to save on shipping; these companies very likely will turn out to be scams.
