Alibaba.com Changed My Life
So as soon as I learned how to use Alibaba.com, my entire life changed, and the reason for that is I was able to find suppliers that could source me with products that I could now sell on the internet in various different ways, and one of the ways that I sold those products was on Amazon.com. If it wasn’t for Alibaba.com, I would have never have gotten to the point of quitting my full-time job, traveling around the world, and just living a life of pure freedom.
Finding the Best Supplier
So make sure you stick around for this entire article from start to finish because I’m going to go through all of the steps that you need to be aware of when it comes to finding the best supplier that can help you when it comes to building up your Amazon business or any physical product business that you want to build up.
Chinese Suppliers on Alibaba
Now because Alibaba is a Chinese founded company, majority of the suppliers that are on there are going to be based in China, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t go on there, find suppliers in India, in other parts of Asia, in Africa, United States, but the main supplier that you’re going to come across is a Chinese base one.
Advantages of Chinese Suppliers
And the reason why it’s a good thing for you to use a Chinese supplier is because the price that you’re going to get the item for is going to be a lot lower than if you had to use a supplier that was based anywhere outside of China, e.g. the United Kingdom, United States, or any Western Country. This is because China has various different factories and manufacturing operations when it comes to producing most of the products that you’re using on a day-to-day basis.
Quality of Chinese Products
Even the iPhones that we all use are manufactured in China, so you shouldn’t have any sort of negative view when it comes to finding your supplier in China because a lot of the products that we use originally come from there anyway. So now that you have an understanding of what Alibaba is, now you need to understand how to register to it.
Registering on Alibaba.com
Now this is also simple because all you need to do is just go over to Alibaba.com just like this, and once you get over here, you’re going to see this button that says sign up. It’s then going to take you to this page which is really easy to complete, and just to answer one common question that I get all the time, which is, “Sam, do I need an LLC or an LTD company for me to use Alibaba?” You don’t need to have a registered business with documentation. Just make sure that the rest of the information that you put is accurate, for example, your email address, your telephone number, and your full name.
Searching for Products on Alibaba
And once you’ve created your account, this is the next page that you’re going to see. Now once you get to this point, you need to type in whatever product that you’re searching for into this section over here, but of course you’re going to need to have an idea of what product you’re searching for first and foremost.
Using Helium 10 for Product Research
So what I would recommend that you do if you are thinking about selling a particular product on Amazon by doing Amazon FBA, Amazon FBM, whichever option that you want to go down, is to go over to this tool over here called Helium 10. Helium 10 is going to be able to give you accurate information on the best product for you to sell on Amazon that you can find on Alibaba.com.
Signing Up for Helium 10
So you can sign up to it by using the link in my description down below. It’s going to give you some sort of a discount, and you’re going to be able to access it for a lot cheaper than what you would have been able to do if you went directly to them. So use that link in my description down below. Just click on get started today.
Navigating Helium 10
Once you’ve created your Helium 10 account, this is the page that you’re going to see. Now when it comes to using it to find the best winning product that you can sell on Amazon, what you need to do is come over here to where it says tools. It’s going to give you all of these different options where you’ve got all of these different features, but the one that you’re going to click on is Blackbox. So just select it just like that.
Selecting Amazon Domain
What you then need to do is select the Amazon domain that you’re going to be selling on. So you’ve got all of these different options when it comes to accurately finding the best winning product that’s going to sell on the domain that you’re going to be selling on, but for the purpose of today’s article, I’m just going to select Amazon.com.
Choosing a Niche
Even if I could find winning products in this niche, it’s not going to excite me. I would rather find products in a niche that I care about, that I believe in, that I know that I’m going to be able to put my effort into. And one niche that always stands out to me is the pet niche because I know that people care about their pets. I grew up with pets as well in my house, so it’s something that you know means a lot to me. So I’m going to use the pet supplies niche as an example in this article.
Sorting Search Results
Now once you get to this stage on Helium 10, what you want to do is sort the monthly revenue from highest to lowest, and then from this point, it’s just going to be a case of you scrolling through and finding an item that stands out to you that you want to look into, you want to sell, and you want to see if it’s available on Alibaba.
Analyzing Amazon Search Results
And as we can instantly see, the sellers that are on the first page that don’t have hundreds and hundreds of reviews, this one’s got 29, this one’s got 24, this one’s got five reviews, but yet they’re on the first page. So what you can do from here is just click on the Helium 10 Google Chrome extension tool, click on this option, and what you’re going to do from here is take a look at the total revenue.
Evaluating Product Revenue
So we can see with this product, it brought in over $1.5 million. If I just sort the review count from highest to lowest, we can see that sellers that only have around 10, 13, 24 reviews are still bringing in over $4,000. There’s this guy over here that brought in over $111,000. So this is a product that I might want to sell.
Searching for the Product on Alibaba
That’s just a quick version of doing product research, but now that I’ve got an idea of what item I want to look for on Alibaba.com, which is going to be something similar to this one over here, I’m just going to come back over to Alibaba, paste the keyword of the item over there, click on search, and what we want to do is find the exact same item.
Evaluating Supplier Credibility
Now there’s some key things that you need to look out for. So as we can see with this supplier over here, it is the exact same one, but as you can see, this supplier has only been on the platform for one year. You want to avoid these suppliers at all cost, and you want to look for suppliers that have been on Alibaba for a minimum of 3 years, 4 years, 5 years.
Importance of Supplier Experience
The longer they’ve been on the platform, the more trusted they could be. In my personal opinion, suppliers that have been on Alibaba for one year, there’s a chance that you could get scammed or maybe they might not sell you a good quality item. So always look for suppliers like this. As you can see with this supplier, they’ve been on this platform for 9 years, which is amazing, and they’re also verified.
Understanding Verified Suppliers
Now what verified means is that a third party company and audit company has, you know, made sure that they’re selling what they claim to be selling. So whenever you see this verified badge, it’s an extra layer of security. So you want to ideally look out for this as well.
Checking Supplier Specialization
And I would say that one last thing that I don’t see anyone else on YouTube talking about when it comes to identifying the best supplier to go with is to make sure that they actually specialize in the type of products that you plan on selling. And the way that you can figure that out is by clicking into their company profile.
Reviewing Supplier Profile
By clicking on their name on this page, you’re going to be able to get a lot of useful information about whatever supplier that you’re looking at. You can see their factory over here. You can see their workers doing what they’re doing. You can also see their production as well as their quality control, and you just get some other information about when they started, you know, what language do they speak, how many years they’ve been in the business, just a lot of useful information to help you make a really good decision.
Examining Supplier’s Product Range
And what you also want to do is click on the other products that they sell. I already know that the supplier specializes in pet products because it’s in the name of their business, but you can also see what other items they sell over here. This is going to give you another indication that they specialize in the pet niche or whatever niche you’re looking at.
Contacting Suppliers
But now that you’ve all got an idea of exactly what to look out for when it comes to choosing the best supplier, the next thing that you need to know how to do is how to contact them. So my recommendation is that you don’t want to just contact one supplier. You want to try and contact as many different suppliers that meet the criteria that I just spoke about.
Reaching Out to Multiple Suppliers
So for example, I would reach out to this one. I may also want to reach out to this one, just every single one. And I’m going to keep going down to the bottom, and I’m going to keep going to page two, page three, page four. So there’s multiple different ways that you can reach out to all of these different suppliers.
Sending Inquiries
What you can do is just click into the product just like this. From here, what you can do is just buy the order straight away if you wanted to, but I wouldn’t recommend that. I would say send them a message first by clicking on this icon. In the section, you’re going to be able to ask all of the questions that you want to ask when it comes to whatever product that you’re selling.
Using an Email Template
Now I’ve got a template that I tend to use when it comes to reaching out to all of these different suppliers. This is the email template over here. I’m not going to read out the entire thing. I don’t want to bore you with that. You can pause the screen right now and take a look, but the main reason for this email template is that I get to ask the most important questions, which is knowing exactly how much is going to cost for the amount of units that I want to buy, knowing if they accept Alibaba’s trade assurance, which I’m going to touch on in a bit, asking them if it’s possible for them to ship it directly to an Amazon warehouse rather than them shipping it to me and then me shipping it to Amazon, and most importantly, knowing what the return or warranty information is.
Customizing the Email Template
Whenever I’m sending a new email to any supplier, I always come over here and, you know, change these sections and insert the correct information for whatever product that I’m looking to import.
Sending Inquiries to Suppliers
But assuming that I’ve already inserted all of the information in it, what I’ll do is just copy it just like that, come back over here, paste the email in there just like this, change the quantity for how much I want just like that, and then send inquiry. And then again, I’ll do the exact same thing for every single supplier that’s selling this product so that I can get all of the responses back at the same time, and it’s going to make it much easier for me when it comes to comparing the prices for all of the different suppliers that are selling this particular product.
Using Trade Assurance for Payments
And when it comes to sending any money to any supplier, of course you want to make sure that you do your return on investment calculations to make sure that you’re going to make profit. But when I say that you should use trade assurance to send the money to them, for those of you that’s never heard of trade assurance before, it’s basically Alibaba’s payment method, and it works in a similar way to escrow.
Understanding Trade Assurance
And what escrow is is where Alibaba is going to hold on to the money. So the price that you and the supplier have agreed upon, the supplier is going to create the order in the back end of Alibaba. You’re going to receive the order in your Alibaba account. You’re then going to make the payment using trade assurance. Alibaba is going to hold on to the money, and it’s only at the point where you receive the goods that’s where you’re going to let Alibaba know that you’re completely happy with everything. They’ll release it to the supplier. Everyone’s happy.
Importance of Trade Assurance
But the reason why it’s important for you to use trade assurance and not something like Western Union or even some other payment method is because your money is going to be protected if there is any issues. Whenever I send money to any brand new supplier that I’m using, I always use trade assurance. And once I’m happy with them and once I know that I can trust them, that’s the point where I might look for cheaper alternatives when it comes to exchange rates and things like that.
Advice for Beginners
But for any beginner out there that’s looking to start their Amazon store or any e-commerce business, always make sure to use trade assurance when dealing with any supplier on Alibaba.com. But I would say that those are some of the most important things that you need to know when it comes to finding the best supplier to use on Alibaba.