4 Things Sellers Get Wrong About Importing from China
Here’s why some products might be best avoided altogether, and how to ensure suppliers fully understand your product requirements
This post is by Maegan Burkhart, a Content Specialist at Asia Quality Focus.
Go to the listings for just about any type of product on Amazon and you’ll probably find a large portion of those goods are made in China.
China is still the premiere manufacturing location for many importers, despite rising labor costs and recent trade tensions. Especially for inexperienced ecommerce sellers, it makes sense to start importing from China. It’s easier to find suppliers with the expertise to manufacture quality goods for overseas markets in China than elsewhere in Asia.
But although ecommerce sellers have been importing from China for years, they still face many challenges with Chinese suppliers. Many misconceptions persist about how to import from China and effectively manage product quality there.
Most misunderstandings with Chinese suppliers are a result of poor communication, unclear requirements and poor preparation. So here are some of the main things ecommerce sellers get wrong about importing from China.
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6 Negotiation Strategies to Use With Your Chinese Suppliers
How to get better prices from your suppliers without sacrificing quality. Includes tried-and-tested email scripts that you can use straight away.
This post is by Jae Jun, a seven-figure Amazon seller and founder of Gorilla ROI, software that connects Seller Central data to Google Sheets.
You’ve found a brilliant product on Amazon. The scouting methods and tools show you that this is the one.
You’ve gone through the initial steps of:
- Contacting multiple suppliers and requesting samples
- Rigorous sample testing
- Narrowing it down to two suppliers based on the initial samples and price
At this point you are going to enter the negotiation stage as you don’t want to take the quoted prices at face value.
I’m going to share six simple strategies to help you negotiate and get better prices from your suppliers, without sacrificing quality and workmanship.
How to Integrate with Amazon Vendor Using EDI
Amazon Vendor does not have an API, so retailers who want to integrate with the system have to get to grips with the obscure world of EDI
This post is by Katherine Khoo, Managing Director at ecommerce software development company Khoo Systems.
If you’re an Amazon Vendor (or a seller considering the Vendor program) the question of how to integrate with the system is likely to have come up. What does it take to connect with Amazon Vendor? And how does it work?
Amazon Vendor uses an interface called EDI (electronic data interchange) which allows you to extract order management data from Amazon Vendor. Unlike the Amazon marketplace and other common sales channels, Amazon Vendor does not have an API (application programming interface) so EDI is your only option.
In this post we’ll explore what EDI means, how it works for Vendors, and what it looks like technically.
To learn more about the Amazon Vendor program in general, see Amazon Vendor Central: Everything You Need to Know.
