We can surely understand that saving purchasing cost is one main reason why more and more Western people start to think of sourcing from China. Well, it’s correct for most of the cituation. Many companies have already gained the success by saving a lot. But before be excited, I suggest you consider seriously about whether you can also be successful for your own business.
As you can know, quality is one aspect that you cannot give a concession. In another word, you won’t accept stuff with poor quality even they are at very low price level, cause your market and customers won’t buy them. This is what I would like to talk about. In China, you can find a lot of different scales of manufacturer, some of them are big groups, but most of them are family-based factories, who are based in all kind of industries. They may only have 10 or even less workers. If what you want to buy from China is something already exists, which means it’s a mature product and produced by a big company. In this case, you may have a chance to see the product itself in your own country. Here I mean the product on the market, not the prototypes. Then you can contact with the manufacturer or its agent in China for price. What you need to be careful is not to buy something fake. In another situation, you need to buy something which is not on the market and need to be developed by you or even with your new supplier. In that case, only if you really have a very good agency or a contact person in China, you could be successful. If not, you may encounter a lot of problems.
During the development period, you may have the problems of mould or prototype modification. For example, if you want to make something plastic, it may take you about 2 or 3 months, or even longer.
Before launching of production, you may worry about the raw material identification.
During the production, you may encounter the unstable quality problems.
Before shipment, you may receive a quality report that may contain something not true.
Well, it’s not easy to handle all of those well. You may think of turning to some big company for cooperation. It’s true that big companies do much better in QC than those small manufacturers. But their price is also high. And one more important point is, they will also require a much bigger MOQ (minimum order quantity) which may be much larger than your sourcing plan. Here I just assume you are a small business man. If you are handling a big stuff, then you can ignore my post here.
To be successful, you need to learn more about the situation.
