Let’s clear shadows in your mind. Today’s topic is about finding and picking the right supplier for your business. First, understand your goal. Are you aiming to be a distributor, or are you trying to create your own brand? If you’re looking to build your brand, here are the details on how to find and pick your supplier.

Understand Your Industry’s Export Data

Start by finding the export data for your industry. For example, if you’re in the sports equipment industry, you can see that China dominates with a 49.6% market share. This means you should focus your research primarily on China, with some effort on the top two or three other exporting countries. The reason for this is simple: when doing an in-depth supplier analysis, you need to understand various aspects of the suppliers, including their industry strength, public reputation, and relationships with buyers and partners. Gathering all this information often requires local tools and resources.

Alright, let’s into the time eater part. As I mention, in clear shadows when we trying to do a deep research about a business, we need to do research from three main aspects.

Conduct In-Depth Research

As we do at Clear Shadows, thorough research involves three main aspects:

1. Business Strength

When researching suppliers, focus on their product strength. Check their patents (for Chinese suppliers, use CNIPA; for countries using google most, use Google Patent Search, for more accurate information, check local gov patent web). Look into their business profile to see if they have any lawsuits and what those are about. Check customs data to see their total exports and trends.

2. Public Reputation

Look at the most popular apps/websites for reviews about their products (not services). If you find bad reviews focusing on service but not on the product, you might have found a good supplier. Remember, you’re the one providing the brand/service, so as long as the product is good, you’re fine. If you can’t find any reviews, consider the following possibilities:

  • They may only do B2B trading, so look for reviews about their distributors.
  • They might only export and not sell in the domestic market, which is common in China.
  • They could primarily serve government bodies, so free market information might be limited. Normally those suppliers won’t be your good choice as well.

3. Relationships with Partners

Double-check their lawsuit information. If they have many cases where they are the defendant, it’s a red flag, regardless of their product quality. You don’t want to end up in a legal dispute. If possible, communicate with their current or past partners, but choose those without conflicts of interest to avoid misleading information.

Once you’ve done all those research and collect enough data and did proper analysis, I believe you step one more foot into success. Of course, if you think it’s troublesome you can hand this to us and we would give you the perfect report.