Amazon FBA: 5 Things You MUST KNOW Before Buying From Alibaba [Important]

so i literally sent three thousand dollars to my supplier on alibaba and my supplier just disappeared they didn't send me any messages for like a week and you know i was like did i just get scammed hey what's going on welcome back to the channel my name is dan i'm super happy to have you here with me today and in today's video i'm gonna be talking about the five most important things that you must know before buying from alibaba suppliers as we all know alibaba is the number one manufacturer sourcing website in the world that exists for finding suppliers for ecommerce products in china and specifically in asia it's generated many millions of dollars in product sales online having found suppliers through there for both amazon fba and shopify i've literally spoken to hundreds of suppliers on there you know it's just been it's just been a very interesting journey i will say that alibaba is kind of amazed for people getting started with amazon or shopify you got all these suppliers on the website you got all these pro products popping out at you like boom boom boom boom you know you're seeing words like moq trade assurance verified supplier manufacturer trader you don't really know what all that means because you're just a beginner you're just getting started and it might seem very confusing i actually have another video on my channel called how to find the best suppliers on alibaba you can check that one out as well it's going to show you in depth on how to find the best suppliers for your ecommerce product and store now one of the biggest things that beginner sphere is sending money to a supplier in china and then having that supplier just run away with their money or screwing you or cheating you in some way by sending you faulty product or something like that you know i've spoken to so many people who are getting started along their e-commerce amazon fba shopify journey and they're just so afraid they're so afraid of these things happening they're afraid of even speaking to suppliers i've had people that you know they're just scared of talking to them because they're scared of sounding stupid or looking like they don't really know what they're talking about and then having the supplier just kind of you know cancel on them and not really respond to their messages so all these fears are completely understandable uh some people have them more than others it really just depends you know on your own uh emotions and fears and beliefs and things like that for myself personally i really didn't have that fear when i was starting out but i definitely wondered whether it was safe to use alibaba you know to send money to my suppliers or whether they would just like take my money and run away so i'm going to share with you the top five things that you must know to successfully buy products from a supplier on alibaba these are literally the absolute best tips that i have for you to really have a smooth working relationship find the absolute best supplier for your ecommerce product and really have that comforting feeling of knowing that you have found the best possible supplier for your product and they're going to send you good product you can rely on them and you can basically rely on them to be like the backbone of your business because that's what they are you know without a great supplier there's no such thing an ecommerce business can't really run it can't really exist right so the first thing that you definitely must do when you are buying from alibaba is to order samples this is so so so important and you should definitely order at least three maybe even five if you have the budget because the sample is gonna cost you typically fifty dollars per unit it's much more expensive than if you were to actually buy the units in bulk of course just because they have to make that sample specifically for you and then they have to uh it's just more expensive to ship an individual unit than it is to ship obviously in bulk and the reason why we order samples is because product quality is king in e-commerce uh you like the way that i teach on my channel and the way that i actually do my own e-commerce brands you know i always focus on product quality if the product's quality is not exceptional i will not sell it because i know that that's going to buy me in the isolator on i know that it's going to just kind of screw my brand from the very beginning so the best thing that you can do by far like the 80 20 that's going to give you the majority of your success it's ensuring that the quality of your product is amazing and this is why getting samples is so important i used to yolo it i used to never buy samples i used to just back in 2017 when i started i actually got my first successful product which went from my investment of eighteen hundred dollars to thirty two thousand dollars per month i actually just yelled it and didn't even see the product and it worked but the thing is is that that kind of bit me in the ass later because when i as i launched more and more products people started there was one particular product that i launched the jade roller and a lot of my customers were having issues with the fact that apparently it was breaking upon delivery which i didn't really realize because obviously i didn't get samples if i did get samples i would have taken a look taken one look at the box and been like okay this is definitely gonna break when it gets to the customer because i find that my supplier wasn't using enough packing material you know like the foam stuff to really make sure that uh it doesn't break so you don't wanna yolo it in 2021 2022 2023 you want to make sure you are ordering samples this is so important and it's just not worth shortcutting a few weeks of your time uh you know because obviously you don't have to wait for the samples if you don't order them it's just not worth shortcutting those few weeks just because you decided to skip the samples and you know that really shows that you don't really care about the product quality and you have no idea what the product's actually going to look like when it gets to your customer one big thing as well is buying samples from multiple suppliers allows you to really kind of find the best quality product from the best supplier for the product you want to sell because let's say if we're selling bbq gloves the classic example that i'm obviously super original i can't think of a better example than barbecue gloves which i always use so barbecue gloves well you know barbecue gloves are barbecue gloves but obviously there might be some slight differences that in the customer's eyes could really make the barbecue gloves look a lot better and so that's why getting samples you know you get the point it's so so important you can obviously uh see which product is actually going to be the best what i always aim for with my new ecommerce products with my brands is i always try to go for the apple store vibe right so obviously the apple store and how apple brand this product it's just like the best it's the best phone it's the best you know ipad i don't even know what what is a tablet right we call it an ipad that's how good it is you know let's say if we're going to launch a barbecuing brand well you want to be like the apple store of barbecuing you want to have the best gloves the best everything and it's not that hard to get that it just takes a little bit of work it just takes a little bit of thinking and really just sitting down with your target market asking them questions and really being objective with them and having them objectively tell you what looks good another thing is that most ecommerce stores online are literally just direct from china and the further you can get away from that the more successful you'll be a lot of stores they just drop ship products from china it looks like a very cheap aliexpress copy and you don't want to be an aliexpress copy you want to really build something like a snow teeth whitening something like a like what we're doing with bro day something like a coffee gator on amazon something like alpha grillers on amazon right so some of the most successful private label brands um so yeah that's uh really why order examples are so important so to order samples all you really have to do is go to alibaba and then type in your products so let's say like um barbecue gloves because i'm super original here we are right so let's say that you like this pair and you know you like this and this let's just say like this one right so you just go here and then what you do is you contact supplier and then you basically send them over the supplier contact template which you can get for free it's part of my free amazon fba starter pack you can get that link down below and that also has a bunch of other extremely extremely useful things that help you with finding a successful product product research contacting suppliers as well as a few other goodies in there so very very useful you fire fire them off that supply template basically in that template you're already asking them for a sample so that's already gonna be covered tip number two check your suppliers pages this is so so so important super easy to do i'm gonna show you now so what i mean by check the suppliers page let's say that you're interested in this supplier right here so what you want to do is you want to here i'm going to zoom in and show you you want to look at this right here so hanan hawaii glove company limited just as a quick a quick tip here all chinese suppliers have a four word supplier name so the first letter of the first word is always gonna be the city where the suppliers factory is at the second word is always gonna be the name that they actually chose for themselves so in this case it could i think it's hawaii glove and then the third word is gonna be like the type of business and the fourth word is going to be the business entities so in this case it's a limited company and hawaii glove right but if you look at any of their suppliers if we go barbecue gloves and we just search by suppliers instead we hit search you'll find here that you can see zheng zhu zomad company all right so zhengju that's the city uh shengenji that's the city shenzhen obviously shenzhen i still got to get out there i'm actually really looking forward to that maybe when the world situation dies down a little bit you know and with the tests and all that but i really want to go to shenzhen side note i just worked a lot of supplies from there but um yeah ningbo you know that's the city guangmu is the name they chose for themselves hardware like some suppliers will choose an english name um but yeah it's just uh it's just a cool little tip to know so i'm gonna show you how to actually evaluate a supplier based on their page so what you do let's say this one right here right so what you do is you first you look for a few things so the first thing you want to look for is trade assurance this means that um you can actually pay them via alibaba's trade assurance payment method which is the most which is the safest payment method because basically alibaba holds your money in escrow in their account you send the money to alibaba's account you don't send it directly to them it's not a direct wire transfer to your supplier and so basically what happens is that you know as long as you've actually confirmed all the details of your deal with the supplier in alibaba's message center which is very important i'm going to touch on this later then if anything happens you know if the product has problems or if they don't send you enough product or anything at all happens you can actually get a refund and alibaba will return your money to you and they'll solve the problem so you know alibaba would obviously not be such a big company if they just let suppliers scam their their customers right so there you go uh so trade assurance is very important that's what you look for uh one thing though is that i don't like to use alibaba's message center to talk to suppliers because it is super clunky and it's super laggy it's terrible i don't know who coded that and you know they need to freaking like code a new message center or something so what i do instead is i talk to them via skype or whatsapp which is sometimes abandoned china so they have to use like a vpn uh wechat as well but you know recently that's been having issues with like the government i think they put some blocks on wechat but skype is usually uh the best way so you can just use skype you can um you know you can message them that's what i do and then uh basically as soon as we actually have our negotiations finished our deal is confirmed at that point that's when i'm like okay i'm gonna send you everything we talked about on the message center and i want you to just verbally confirm it and then as long as you have a record of that there then you can pay via alibaba trade assurance and then alibaba will cover you just in case anything happens all right so once you've confirmed that the supplier has trade assurance the next thing you want to look for is verified suppliers so it's a special badge you can see here that the zheng zhu zomaj zomagic company doesn't have it but zheng ji has the verified supplier badge basically what this is is alibaba has like a special supplier vetting program where they actually go and send in their inspectors to check out a supplier and you know really kind of make sure they meet the standards and so you'll find that if you filter out by trade assurance like this you can also do it when you're searching for products so right now we have 1280 once we do trade and then if we do verify we have 361 with both check marked you can see that the number drops significantly so verified is always a good thing to to look for for a supplier but if it doesn't say verified like let's say you really found a supplier and the product is good you got a sample that's fine the supplier doesn't have to absolutely be a verified supplier but the supplier should absolutely have the trade assurance badge okay the next thing you look at is let's say you're looking at the supplier right so you zoom in and you look at the revenue so if the revenue is anything you know above like in the millions basically and most of them are then that's a good sign that means that they move a lot of volume and they're very experienced with the whole exporting thing right so that's a good sign and then what you want to do also is you want to click into the supplier and that's going to take you to the company overview page and so then what you want to do is you want to scroll down one thing you look at is the manufacturer or trading company sign here so it's either going to say just manufacturer just trading company or both the difference is is that a manufacturer they make the product a trading company actually is the middleman so they'll buy from a factory and they'll resell it at a markup now i've worked with trading companies equally as i've worked with manufacturers in the past and it's no big deal in this case if you see both that means that they they actually make some product but they also have the power to be a middleman and source products from other suppliers as well which is a good thing because they just make it easier you know a lot of the connections in china all these suppliers are they have like all these connections with each other and they just know how to source all their products and where to get them from right you can also look at certifications so this one's iso which is always a good thing to have you can see where it's from employees and then you also want to look at like the pictures right so most of them are pretty generic like yeah we see the bbq gloves you know that's how they're made you know there's uh the dude he's chilling and then you also want to look at the years in the business so if it's anything above two three years that's fine uh especially here this eleven years so that really shows that they're experienced the next thing you want to look for on alibaba is you want to make sure that you always get a product inspection done now i'm going to link the best company that i personally work with and that all of our team members that run successfully commerce brands work with at my company com freedom i have an entire team of people and several of us actually own successful brands doing amazing numbers on shopify and amazon with our brand so i'm going to link our preferred inspection company down below they're the best typically why you want to do this is you know sometimes you're going to pay money to a supplier and they're going to manufacture the product and it's just going to have defects and faults and actually a certain amount of defects per let's say 100 units or per thousand units is normal so in any manufacturing process there's always going to be an allowance for defects that's just a normal thing but obviously with a product inspection you can have an inspector actually go to the supplier go to suppliers place and then they're going to actually open up the box and really take a look at the product and typically how it works is let's say if it's a 1 000 unit order what's going to happen is that they're going to open 80 of the units so that's typically how it is it's not every single unit that would be incredibly expensive and incredibly inefficient and there's no need for that so always get an inspection it's going to cost you a few hundred but you know believe me i've had inspections before and it was such a good thing that i did because if i didn't do the inspection i would have literally sent in garbage product like it was just not good and so that way you can really fix things with your supplier before you um before that inventory gets to amazon you risk getting bad reviews and just an overall bad start to your business all right tip number four you want to pay your supplier at the following deposit rates so typically what i do is 30 70 meaning that when you actually agree to a deal with your supplier you want to pay them 30 percent of the total order up front of the total invoice amount and then once they actually finish manufacturing your product that could take like a week or two weeks or three weeks and they're ready to ship it out then you pay them the rest of the 70 most suppliers are very willing to do this but some suppliers actually will not want to do this for some reason that should be a red flag if they're really being adamant about the fact that no we can't do 30 70 well then offer them to pay 50 50. so 50 up front and then 50 before the product gets shipped out to amazon they will not ship up the product out of their factory until you pay the full invoice amount which is fine uh so 30 70 or 50 50. and if they insist on 100 i would just skip the supplier tip number five make sure you negotiate so with alibaba suppliers uh they're not going to be the most direct with you and when you contact these suppliers in china they're always going to give you the highest prices they're always going to basically assume that you're going to try to negotiate the price down by at least 25 down 30 even half down and so that's why it's so important to negotiate like everything is negotiable with chinese suppliers everything the moq's the minimum order quality price another great technique is to ask them how much is the price for 5 000 units and so typically obviously the price will be much much lower at 5 000 units than at a thousand or 500 and so you can actually use that so if they tell you that it's a dollar at five thousand and two dollars at uh one thousand well then you can try to get that price and move it all the way down to you know as close as you can to that dollar value maybe a dollar twenty five is fine you wanna make sure that through your negotiations you're not being super aggressive and that you always do uh what ends up being a win-win deal with your supplier and yourself if it's not a win-win trust me they're going to figure out a way to screw you and it's not going to be good for your business you want to make sure that they're happy because just like yourself they're also in the game make a profit and one final bonus tip you want to make sure that your product has no restrictions when you are going to sell it on amazon this is something that screws up a lot of beginners because they don't realize that a lot of products on amazon are actually restricted or they have patents or they're trademarked the name that they want to do so an easy way to figure out if your product is restricted or not it's just to look at the amazon restricted products list i'm going to link that down below as well and then also check out any patents that are actually active on your product what a patent is basically somebody who invented a product they patented a specific product design and they have an exclusive license a patent to sell that product and so no one else can sell it and chinese suppliers have no idea they have no idea and you can't expect them to have an idea because they're all they're all the way in china even though they're selling to us customers it's not really the responsibility to know what's patented and what's not anyway they wouldn't tell you because that's hurting their business right and quite frankly they don't care so make sure you do your due diligence make sure that you always check these things another great thing to do is to create a ghost listing i talk about this in my super long super in-depth 5 hour amazon fba video so that's really really useful as well you'll find a link to that down below you can check that out i have an entire playlist of all my most valuable amazon fba videos to help you start your business now one of my biggest biggest tips by far and this is a final note that i want to leave you all with this video supplier relationship is key a lot of people don't really realize that your supplier relationship is the backbone of your ecommerce business and if you screw up the relationship with your supplier it's not i mean it's the death of your business your your business is already dead at that point because obviously your suppliers just gonna not want to work with you and if you piss them off they might send you bad units they might just literally refuse to work with you in the future my point is is that if you try to screw your supplier they'll definitely screw you make sure that it's always a win-win you know this is just human relationships psychology i guess we're all selfish in our own ways but the best deals are always win-win deals at least that's what i believe and i've used that approach in my e-commerce businesses and in my supplier relationships and it's worked amazingly now finding a good supplier is just one part of getting a successful ecommerce business up and running because once you find a supplier you need to figure out how to market your product build out your store and listing figure out how to launch your product on amazon so it actually starts getting sales because a lot of people think that once you get the product that amazon is just gonna start selling when it's not you need to figure out a way to actually get it to page one because page one and page two is where all the sales happen mostly on page one you know there's all these things that you need to do and you need to learn how to do to make sure that your hard earned money that you paid for your inventory does not go to waste and actually ends up being a very profitable business and endeavor for yourself that gives you financial freedom and a real business that can actually support your dream freedom lifestyle so all these steps obviously they involve a steep learning curve and as much as i cover all this on my youtube channel there is no better resource than getting a quality course in mentorship so i cover all this in the econ freedom course which is my coaching company's course where we've helped literally thousands of people start successful amazon fba businesses and change their lives reach six seven figures per year with their businesses and really build out successful e-commerce brands that um you know keep growing and that can later be sold for a cash wind fall at millions of dollars you can check out some of the student success interviews that i've had on my channel i film literally a new interview every single week because we have so many successful students so you can check those out on my channel and really see uh kind of like from the students themselves people who have actually succeeded so you have unlimited access to the course everything you need 100 hours of step-by-step video and you get dedicated access to our team of seven-figure amazon fba verified sellers as well as myself and then you know my results you can find them on youtube in the youtube community i actually posted the results of one of our brands broday where we're doing like two 5k days two k five day 5k days so you can check that out as well and then you know you also have mentorship calls zoom calls with myself as well as our team of actual successful amazon fba sellers so it's by far the number one best investment that you can make most people that try to get this business up and running for free they end up failing they lose a bunch of money so there's gonna be a link down below to a seven day free trial you can try it out for free zero risk there's literally no excuse not to try it out because if you don't like it you can get your money i mean we don't even take any money so um you know you're not gonna lose anything and there's also a special offer that you can take advantage of as well just to make it a little bit easier for you to actually join we always run some kind of a deal you'll also find a case study below called the freedom blueprint where i take a brand new product a brand new brand and then scale it to a million dollar evaluation and then six seven figures per year so depending on when you watch this video it's either still in production or it's going to be available that's also going to be down below as well and finally this is going to be super super helpful too if you are looking for between 1 and 10k for your ecommerce brand and you want to partner up with the best in the industry with myself as well as my team of successful sellers then you can go ahead and apply for investment there's no other company there's another person online that's doing this so if you want between 1 and 10k and you want to partner up with the best you know and with us really going to make sure that we grow your brand and we help you really take it to the next level then you can go ahead and also apply it down below for the econ freedom vc the deadline for the current round of applications will also be found there thank you so much for watching subscribe to the channel for the absolute best entrepreneurship ecommerce videos i hope you have an amazing rest of your day add me on instagram at danvest i always answer dm so you can send me a message on there if you want as well thank you so much see ya

Channel: Dan Vas

Views: 11,044

Keywords: amazon fba, ecommerce, alibaba suppliers, how to find a manufacturer on alibaba, how to find a supplier on alibaba, how to buy from alibaba, how to find suppliers on alibaba, how to find alibaba suppliers, ship from china to amazon fba, alibaba supplier tutorial, alibaba trusted suppliers, how to use alibaba, how to find product on alibaba, things you must know before buying from alibaba, alibaba tutorial, amazon fba wholesale, how to communicate with alibaba suppliers, dan vas

Id: IGp8MXFflu0

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021