The website Alibaba (www.alibaba.com) is the most popular option people and companies use to find suppliers (not only in China, but also other countries such as Vietnam, India, Turkey and others). Search suppliers in Alibaba is a very easy task, however the results of your search can be risky sometimes.
As you may know already, Alibaba is a website with similar functions to the suppliers as Amazon or Ebay is to the sellers but mainly focused on mass quantities and export business, so it is common that huge amounts of Chinese companies register their information and upload their products on the website everyday (similar situation for the sellers in Amazon or Ebay), so when the buyers search in Alibaba a product, the website usually show an endless amount of results.
Many of these suppliers which the user can search easily in Alibaba might not be as trustful as they look. In China, there are new and small supply companies which are desperate to start selling, and they (not all of them, but a significant part) might do everything they can to get a paying customer, sometimes they do not even have the product specified as the customer asked but they say they do, and the customer pays and waits for the delivery, this is a very huge risk.
The main purpose of this article is to give you some basic recommendations during your search in Alibaba. The following tips don’t guarantee the perfect supplier for your product for 100%, but it will probably put you in better results than just a simple search.
Don’t over filter the search results
The most important filters during your search in the Alibaba website are probably two, filter to the country (China if is the case), and filter gold suppliers.
When filtering results only in China, it is not recommendable to continuing filtering by province; this will decrease a huge amount of search results, some of them which actually can be the best choice you are looking for.
Filtering gold suppliers is actually some way to ensure that the supplier on the search results have been there for at least one year, some of them even for more. If right after gold supplier you use other filters such as Onsite check, assessed supplier and others, the search results could decrease dramatically. Why? Simply because the other options are based on audits, financial tools or services which only big factories might accept during the negotiation and the rest of the factories will not consider.
Big factories are fine, but they come with either a big price or a huge minimum order quantity (MOQ). If you do not have a big quantity to buy (a big purchase power), it is not recommendable to go to the big companies, a medium-level supply or manufacturing company will be more than enough.
Find the product, and then focus on the supplier
Once you search and find the product you are interested of in Alibaba, is time to pay more attention to the supplier or suppliers which offer such product, and this is the main reason that differs this website from Amazon or Ebay, usually buyers come to Alibaba to purchase in mass quantities, and this requires negotiation of terms and prices, which it would not be accomplished unless the buyer communicates with the supplier directly.
Visit their profile, check when they were established, do they have some pictures or an introduction video of the factory? Look for their contact information, and their website, they have a website right? How long have they been gold supplier? The online presence of the supplier either in Alibaba or their own website shows more prestige and trust towards the buyer, compare the information submitted in their profile (factory size, workers quantity) with their information in the company website, if is the same or not, sometimes in their Alibaba profile they show 1000 or 3000 workers, and their website shows 300 or 500.
Know your supplier before contacting them it gives you a good starting position during the negotiation of terms and prices.
Contact them one by one
When the users search in Alibaba usually they click on the check box of each product, and contact them all sending one message, usually 20 suppliers per time. What many of these users don’t know is that each supplier receives the inquiry knowing the buyer also contacted others, they even can know which other suppliers were contacted at the same time, which leads to the point that many of them don’t want to reply the buyer’s inquiry.
After you search and know all details of the suppliers, contact them one by one, send them an Alibaba inquiry message individually, also if they have the email address (usually on the website you can find it), send the same message to their email box directly, this will show them more trust and that you are more interested than just sending one same inquiry message to all of them together.
These important tips improve your search skills in the Alibaba website; it will provide you more accurate results than a simple product search. When the supplier sends you a reply of your inquiry with a quotation, remember to check the price terms according to the Incoterms explained last week.
How do you search products in Alibaba, or in any other website such Amazon or Ebay? Do you use your own techniques? Please share your comments about it.