Business Strategy

When you get into shipping you’re going to have to deal with a couple of things. When you have your product ready to go you’re going to have to determine who is going to be your freight forwarder. They are the companies that handle your documents for you. They clear customs for you, they shuffle all of […]

I’ll tell you, importing from China is not a business for the faint of heart. You have to have a little gut on you. There are basically two ways that money is sent to China: letters of credit and   Letters Of Credit This is a simple document where you go to your bank or a bank that

When you write your specs, here’s something you really need to remember. If you have a contractor friend, you might have them come over and help you write your first order. The bottom line is this. I believe if you ordered a car from China and you didn’t tell them in the spec that it needed

Here’s what you can do now. Once they’ve agreed to the price, then we want to go back and work on the specs. These are some of the coolest things that you would probably never think to do in a million years when it comes to importing. Number one is to ask for special packaging.

So, you’ve toured the factory, you’ve checked out the quality, and you’ve reviewed the prospectus. You’re ready now to absolutely get down to your price for your first order.   I always say that take-its-or-leave- its don’t work when it comes to China importing. At this point, you can start to request the real price. You’ve

The second thing to do is to find an agent. Agents used to be more popular than they are now. An agent is just somebody who understands importing better than you do. They’ll typically take a fee of somewhere between eight and fifteen percent to go out and put together your deal for you: to

There are about three ways that you can really go about sourcing products from China: online sourcing, using an agent, or actually going to China. ONLINE SOURCING A lot of people approach me now and talk about online sourcing, things like http://www.Alibaba.com.  This is probably the biggest website for sourcing products from China. Yahoo owns

My number one concern when importing is limiting risk. This is everything to me. You can have three or four good import deals and then have one or two bad import deals and lose all your money. It is really important that you begin with a mindset at the start of the process of avoiding risk.

If you’re going to do this yourself and really be in charge of the process, there is a way you have to go about importing.   1: Limiting Risk First of all, you have to do your product research. You have to know where your market is. You need to do some price testing and some elasticity

It is not as simple as saying: “These are the best things to import.” What is best for you to import depends on your own particular skill set. 1: Commodity Products Commodity products are things like lumber, concrete blocks, carpeting, and whatever, things that people use up and fundamentally buy based on price, or things they