Alibaba is China's largest e-commerce platform and the second largest search engine after Google. It was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Beijing. Alibaba is best known for its online shopping marketplace where consumers can find products at competitive prices. In addition to selling consumer goods, Alibaba offers services like payment processing, shipping, and logistics. Alibaba is currently ranked 8 in the world by market capitalization.
Finding a reliable supplier is crucial for sourcing because they have control over your final product, raw materials, price, product quality, packaging, shipping, and communication. Literally, they can make or break your business. If you're ready to buy from China,
especially from Alibaba to start your Amazon FBA business. Please read this
article, before you place your first purchase order with the Chinese suppliers. 
Why? because not all of the suppliers listed on Alibaba are direct manufacturers despite there being millions of products and suppliers. Not all of them are trustworthy with clients. Resells are widely available. The middlemen are prepared to take a portion of your earnings. There are also evil folks. Your money will be scammed by them. Don't be afraid, gentlemen, but be careful. I'm going to outline four easy stages for you to follow while you conduct your Alibaba research in this article. If you take these actions, your chance of being conned will be almost zero. Additionally, your chances of discovering a reliable direct manufacturer will significantly increase.
I'm going to give you a bonus tip at the end of the article. When you are ready to contact the Chinese providers, that will save you a ton of time. Are you guys prepared? Let's start now.
All right guys, before we continue onto Alibaba, let's briefly go through the steps I utilize. I can find suppliers on Alibaba without having to spend days evaluating them to maximize the effectiveness of our research. We require a shopping manual. Rookies and professionals look at products on Alibaba, but rookies quickly comment on pricing and MOQ while pros won't do that. They won't waste their time doing that because we are now shopping for suppliers and quality. We can always negotiate prices when we identify a reliable supplier who can create high-quality goods. Let me use MOQ as an example.
If you search on Alibaba for a yoga mat, for instance, there will be over 100,000 product listings, but if you search and sort by suppliers, I'll show you what I found. Only 287 suppliers out of the 980 suppliers will be selling these 100,000 products when we get onto Alibaba. There are only 287 suppliers who have been assessed as gold suppliers and have trade assurance. That indicates that the gold supplier is a paid member, and the supplier is evaluated by either the Alibaba team or a third-party business that has visited the factory audited, and validated the existence of the supplier's factory. Their tools and equipment are real. Additionally, Alibaba provides a free service called trade assurance. You can dispute payment through Alibaba if the product from your purchase order does not meet the requirements. This pyramid, or matrix, is actually the supplier rating system used by Alibaba.
To get Alibaba to discover the suppliers at the top of the pyramid, we need to make use of all the building screening criteria that are already available on their website. My task, if I'm seeking a yoga product, is to choose a few of the 287 suppliers to work with as my business partners. Having learned how to sort, you can now sort suppliers. Let's go over these suppliers' qualifications in four easy steps. Discovering their identity is the first step. You might be wondering why I look at these four criteria when I look at a supplier profile: supplier name, business type, and the number of years selling on Alibaba under the company certification. Why is it important, anyway? When a business is registered in China, the company name is actually extremely structured. Four important components—registration, location, company name, and primary product—must be included in the business name.
For instance, a business in Ningbo City might desire to register itself there and change its name to Golden Star. Additionally, they work on rubber and plastic-related items. They also have limited liability. The company in question is Ningbo Golden Star Plastic. This Ningbo corporation, however, cannot call itself Judd's because Ningbo has a city-level registration. Jud Young is the province above Ningbo and the Young Golden Star Plastic Company. Furthermore, as China is the country with the highest level of corporate registration, they cannot legally name themselves China Golden Star Plastic Company. As a result, suppliers must identify themselves as either manufacturers or trading companies when they advertise their products on Alibaba, depending on the business type. The supplier may occasionally list themselves as a manufacturer and trading company. This means that this provider is able to immediately export the goods to foreign businesses in addition to producing it.
Not all Chinese factories are authorized to export. As a result, they must sell the product to you through a middleman, or trading company. This is certainly quite subjective to say how long you've been selling online. In order to avoid having to watch over and mentor the supplier, I needed them to have at least three years of experience in the eCommerce industry in terms of communication and business maturity. Any business can create any product. Ask the third party to provide a certification, but not all businesses have the infrastructure in place to go through the process of obtaining a business certification. For instance, ISO 9,000 and ISO 14,000 both certify a company's quality system and environmental system, respectively.
Therefore, it's undoubtedly a great to have if a company has gone through these processes and obtained the ISO certification as a business. So you should be able to get a general picture of who they are by looking at these four factors: supplier name, business kind, number of years in operation, and corporate certification. Now, The second step is what they do. You should be able to tell if a supplier has a focused line of products linked to the item you intended to purchase or if they are dispersed and offer a wide range of items, which makes them less effective, by looking at their key products and product categories. As a company focuses more on a single product, they have more negotiating power when buying raw materials, and because they perform repetitive tasks every day, their workers' skills improve and the quality is much more dependable and consistent.
And if you're looking for the product, do you know what you should search for and what you shouldn't? You can check the product page of the supplier to see if they provide those. The next phase is determining where they are and who they are. In essence, the detailed address check shows that they are located in suite 101, room 120, on the 15th level. It goes without saying that you should inquire as to why the supplier claimed to be the manufacturer if their address is listed as an office address. The factory's address should be in an industrial area two hours outside of the city. This is really crucial, however if they are providing an office address, you should raise a concern with the provider on a high level. Guys, you need to check if the city where the supplier is located is outside of the five major coastal provinces.
The reason is because 80% of the manufacturer activities are done in these five coastal provinces. If your supplier is far away from coast and they're in an inner inland city, when you are ready to purchase the product, you are going to have to pay a lot more money. Transporting the goods from the city to the factory, where the factory is located near to the port. And when you are adding the three, the number two and three products, it will be much harder for you to consolidate this supplier with the other suppliers. So, keep this in mind, when you check the supplier edges, finally, the step number four is your suppliers. Naturally, you can learn more about this after contacting the supplier, but if their English is so fluent, you would wonder if they make a living doing this. Is this a supplier factory rep, a middleman, or a trading firm in reality?
If you don't trust what you have checked, you can always do these two things. Number one, use a surprise factory tour. For example, you can call your supplier contact and tell them that you have a purchasing agent in China. He's happened to be nearby the factory area. Can he arrange a quick factory tour for your agent? Or you can ask your supplier contact to do a quick video call. Hey, I wanted to get an idea of what your factory looked like. Can you get onto the production floor and do a quick video call with me using these techniques to find out if your supplier is truly a direct manufacturer? If they always find excuses, you need to put a question mark. Whether they are the direct manufacturer. Now you guys, you have a basic idea of who your supplier is, what they do, where they are at, and how they conduct the business. Let's move on to Alibaba and do a practice run and don't forget the bonus tip on Alibaba.
If we search for a yoga mat in Alibaba, you will see that our search will show us over 100k products. If you sort these a hundred thousand products by suppliers, you will see that it's about a thousand suppliers offering these a hundred thousand products.
And if you continue to apply filters by product gold suppliers, assessed suppliers and trade assured suppliers, we will have a 286 suppliers. You can continue to apply futures listed on the web on the left-hand side. For example, if you want your supplier, absolutely have a ISO 14,000 (environmental standards). Then you can click on this filter that will give you 20 suppliers that meet that standard.
Let's use the first supplier to practice on the supplier qualification steps. If you click on this supplier, first thing I wanted to know is their name. They're calling themselves Yangzhou Chenghong plastic and rubber company. Youngzhou should be their registration name. This is a Yangzhou province. One of the five coastal provinces (as shown above) and Chenhong is their business name. And they're involved in plastic and rubber product (their business type). Now the business type, they claim themselves to be both a manufacturer and a trading company. They can actually produce and export the product directly to you, which is good. Now, if the company has any certifications, they do have ISO 9,000 certification, which gives you a basic idea about the company. Now let's look at their product by looking at their main product. They listed mostly yoga products. And if you look at the product categories, you can see everything about yoga, mostly PVC products. They're very concentrated in doing yoga products, which is good. Their company size is quite small, but that doesn't concern us right now because they obviously can export a lot of products to overseas.
Now, its a time to share with you the bonus tip. When you're ready to contact the suppliers the right way to do that is to check the favorites button and select each one of them that you wanted to contact. All the selected suppliers will be added to your favorite list.
Once you have selected the relevant suppliers (to contact them) then you will be prompted to enter the code, so do it.
Now as you can see that all relevant suppliers have been selected therefore draft your message and it will be sent to all of them;
Once you send your message or query to your suppliers, some of them will reply and may be other feedback is delayed. You should delete the suppliers from favorite list who send their feedback already and later you can send reminder to others;
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