How to find right suppliers and avoid detours when purchasing goods at Alibaba?

How to find the right suppliers and avoid detours when purchasing goods at Alibaba?

In general, if you want to find high-quality supplies in Alibaba, you can focus on the following three points:

1. Quality

The traditional definition of quality may be good or excellent, but for purchasers, the definition of quality should be: the quality that meets the requirements or specifications of the purchase and sale agreement. Therefore, purchasers should know more about the supplier’s understanding of the quality of the product itself. Generally speaking, a supplier with a relatively complete management system should have the following relevant quality documents:

●Quality Certificate

●Commodity inspection certificate

Purchasing personnel should obtain the information mentioned above from suppliers to avoid sales disputes or legal proceedings in future transactions. Generally, the product implementation standards of Chinese products include national standards, professional (departmental) standards, and corporate standards, which are divided into mandatory standards and recommended standards. But usually, in the purchase and sale contract or order, the quality is expressed in one of the following ways:

●The rank of the goods on the market

●Brand

●Commercially commonly used standards

●Physical or chemical specifications

●Performance specifications

●Engineering drawing

●Sample (seller or buyer)

●A combination of the above

When purchasing, the purchaser should first reach a mutually agreed quality standard with the supplier on the product’s quality. Where possible, for some products, such as clothes, home textiles, shoes and other commodities, suppliers should be required to provide pictures of the corresponding samples sealed to avoid future disputes or legal proceedings. For defective goods or goods damaged during storage and transportation, the purchaser should request the supplier to return or refund the goods after the goods arrive.

2. Packaging

Packaging can be divided into two types: inner packaging and outer packaging

The inner packaging is used to protect, display, or illustrate the goods, while the outer packaging is only used to protect the goods during storage and transportation. Well-designed inner packaging can often increase the customer’s willingness to buy. Purchasing personnel should persuade suppliers to learn from good companies in this regard and make improvements to facilitate each other’s sales.

3. Price

In addition to quality and packaging, price is the most important item in all purchases. Relatively high-quality and low-priced products are our procurement goals. The purchaser adds a reasonable gross profit to the purchase price of any product to be purchased, if he or she cannot judges whether the price can attract customers to purchase, he should not purchase from the supplier.

Before purchasing, purchasing personnel should do a good job of market research, investigate the product’s market price, and cannot make a deal based on the one-sided words of the supplier. If you do not find the same product’s market price to check the price, you can refer to the market price of similar products at the selling price. The purchasing personnel should analyze the cost or price first, when comparing prices between multiple suppliers, the purchasing personnel should choose two or three suppliers with lower bids, and then purchase with them separately to obtain a fair and reasonable price.

But when comparing prices, purchasers must not think that the supplier with the lowest price is the most suitable supplier. We must comprehensively select a supplier that can support all aspects of its logistics, after-sales service, marketing support, and other sponsorships and is the best supplier.