The book written by Perry Belcher, Import Export Business Plan – How To Import From China Using Other Peoples Money tells about his experience regarding his import and export business plan (more specifically in China). The book aims to give you a strong education in importing; a strong education in how to reverse risk and put it back on the sellers and other people; and even how to use other people’s money to start your importing business. The book breaks down into the following topics.
- Perry Belcher’s detailed experience on importing business
- playing the risk in the import export business
- provides various answers to the question why import
- list of various options on what to import
- and much more…
Experience
To start with, Perry Belcher had a candle manufacturing company and produces a large number of those inexpensive candles. The thing is, Perry Belcher started importing before he went into China. How? You’ll find out more about his import and export business. When his business became stable, a Chinese importer got interested with it and partially bought a portion of the company. That’s the time when the Chinese importer together with Perry Belcher started to broaden their candle company and imported glasses. This glass is where they put the candle wax. The imported glass costs like .16 cents per piece. Since Perry Belcher have a partner (Chinese importer), he doesn’t need to worry about learning every detail of the business – its ins and outs. He got interested with importing and as the years pass, he found numbers of benefits in it. His wanted to try other types of business and this made him want to go to China.
“Man, it would be cool to direct import some products and sell them online.”
He went to China together with a friend for three and a half weeks to buy equipments and supplies. This was his first experience to go to China and it was a complete disaster and ended up buying nothing. He got confused and felt really foolish with spending much money and time without buying nothing. Then he realizes and created a system,
- how to get best source to import in China
- How to get the best prices to import
- shipping and duties
When Perry Belcher went back to China and followed the system, he started bringing up new products for his business. The bought products for personal use and brought products to sell.
Playing the Risk
Just like any other business, risk is always present. If you don’t know what you are doing, there is an inherent risk in importing. In terms of importing, risks can be found in different directions:
- tax and tariff perspective
- from agents and guys like trying to screw you
- from buying incorrectly and buying for too much
- paying too much for the products you import
Having knowledge with these risks, you will be able to reverse risk and put it back on the sellers and other people.
Why Import?
Importing provides an incredible advantage once you’ve known the ins and outs of this business. One thing for sure is the money. If you buy low and sell the product at a high price, you would directly see your profit there.
One good example is Old Navy that benefits importing. Old Navy is a clothing retailer. Most retailers sell a pair of jeans for $20 for them from a designer, from a U.S. company that had it made somewhere and gone through all the steps. Old Navy figured out that if they could import the jeans themselves for $2 or $3 a pair this would give them an amazing amount of money to spend on marketing. This is how they can run all those cool commercials and run all those great, big stores in the really high traffic locations. They have an unfair advantage over the other clothing retailers as they have the margin to market and the margin to advertise.
What to Import?
Choosing what to import is not as easy as what you think. You just don’t say “These are the best things to import”. It actually varies depending on your own particular set. For commodity products such as lumber, concrete blocks, carpeting, and whatever, things that people use up and fundamentally buy based on price, or things they buy a lot of at a season period of time.
Perry Belcher together with his partner, engage into this commodity product and one of the biggest items they brought was artificial Christmas trees. Just look at how many houses in America have an artificial Christmas tree up at Christmas time? That would probably as high as 95%.