Keywords: Source of goods

Applicable industries: All categories

Applicable seller scale: Novice sellers without source of goods

If you are a novice, my suggestion for choosing a source of goods supplier is to first develop your acquaintance resources, such as whether your relatives, classmates, and colleagues have opened factories. Everyone knows that Chinese society is more of an acquaintance society.

If you make good use of these acquaintance relationships, choosing suppliers will have great advantages in terms of factory cooperation and price. If you work hard to increase sales, one supply and one sales, such a cooperative relationship will take the acquaintance relationship to a higher level.

Secondly, it is to conduct field visits to professional markets and industrial clusters. This model has been very maturely applied in Taobao e-commerce. The most typical one is Yiwu Small Commodity Market, and some industrial cluster regions, such as the wedding dress industry village doing wedding dress cross-border e-commerce, and the wig industry region village doing wig cross-border e-commerce, but this model is also very limited, because it requires a lot of industrial regional selectivity.

Finally, there is the 1688 wholesale website. At present, for many new cross-border e-commerce companies, 1688 is the first platform for choosing suppliers. It not only gathers the largest number of supplier commodity resources in China, but also many factories.

For choosing suppliers on 1688, my suggestion is to first choose real factory suppliers with the ability to continuously develop new products. It is actually quite simple to judge whether a 1688 seller is a real supplier. For example, you can judge from the name of the seller and the product quotation. If necessary, you can also go to the seller's factory for an on-site inspection.

2

How to find a factory to get samples?

If you don't have a fixed product line, the first thing you need to do is to quickly lock in the product category. For example, it is spring now. If you want to make a product called Travel Pillow, we can search the English word Travel pillow on the platform.

We will not discuss whether this product is suitable for you. In fact, all products on the e-commerce platform can be made, but some products need to burn a lot of money while some products have lower promotion fees.

We click on the review area below the listing details page to directly open all the review lists. When you are optimistic about the product Travel Pillow, we need to check the product reviews, especially the one-star and two-star negative reviews

Then browse all the negative reviews of this product. According to the above method, at least check all the products in the current 20 sub-categories. You will have a comprehensive understanding of the material, characteristics, and functions of this product. Then, we will take these product "problems" to 1688 to find the same or similar models

After you calculate the price and weight of the product, you will have a rough range of costs. We need to buy 3-5 such samples from at least 3-5 such suppliers, and then ask them to mail them to you. After receiving the product, you need to try them one by one and repeatedly compare the product materials, functions, and packaging.

Some sellers may think that what I said is nonsense, but according to statistics, it is difficult for most new sellers to take this step. Purchasing samples is the first step to truly start the cross-border road, not registering an account, which is all procedural.

3

How to calculate the cost of a single product?

You will set the price of the product, then you need to calculate the product cost. Take the Shopee platform as an example: the cost of the product includes the purchase price, domestic logistics fees, platform commission, and logistics and delivery fees.

Assume that the purchase cost of your product is 10 RMB, the product weight is 500g, and the selling price is 30 Malaysian ringgit (49.5 RMB)

Then I will take the domestic logistics fee of 1.3 yuan per kilogram as an example:

The domestic logistics fee for a single product is: 0.5kg multiplied by 1.3 equals 6.5 yuan (prices vary from logistics company to logistics company)

The platform commission is 5% of the selling price: 30 multiplied by 5% equals 1.5RM, equivalent to 2.5 yuan

The logistics delivery fee for a single product is about 0-5 Malaysian ringgit (based on 40RM free shipping)

So, the single operating cost of the product is: 10+6.5+2.5+0=19 yuan

The gross profit of a single product is: 49.5 - 19 = 30.5, the gross profit margin of this product is about 61%

The net profit of a single product is: 30.5 yuan minus a certain amount of returns, minus product advertising fees, minus company operating costs, and minus 1% of the final value of exchange losses.

If returns and advertising fees can be well controlled, the net profit margin of this product is about 35% - 45%. I think this product is worth developing only when your product gross profit margin is at least 40% and the net profit margin is above 30%.

If your product can be controlled at a net profit margin of 45% after being on the shelves for 3 months, it means that your product is indeed hot-selling and your company's operations are also mature.

The knowledge points involved today are summarized as follows:

1. From looking at products online to purchasing offline is an extremely important first step.

2. Purchasing with questions about the product is an effective way to choose a factory with tacit cooperation.

3. Choosing 3-5 different factories is the best way to solve information asymmetry. You can know everything about the product price and quality.