Some of my friends want to start the global business but don't know how to find the good China suppliers and goods.So,I will share you some tips in this post.

Where and how to find suppliers

Your best friend in the importing business is AliBaba. I have used it for every single product I have ever imported. I use it for my own businesses, I use it for clients, and I know a ton of people that use it. It is an awesome resource.

Don’t fall into the traps of Doba, WorldWideBrand, Volusion, or whatever other scam solutions are out there to find suppliers. I made the mistake of trying all of these when I first got started, and just ended up wasting hundreds of dollars for little to no value. Just stay away from these, trust me.

With AliBaba, you will be looking at only Gold members. I don’t care how awesome of a deal you get from a non-gold member, or how many factory certifications they have, youDON’T buy from non-gold members. Just following this rule will help you to avoid 98% of the scams and bad suppliers. Any other certifications or whatever are just icing on the cake.

You really want to find a supplier that will do cheap samples, offers PayPal payments (even at an increased rate, use PayPal), and seems to respond to your communications quickly and effectively.

Open up AliBaba for now, as you will be jumping back to it frequently while researching product to know if you can make a profit.

Where and how to find products

There are a few limits on what kinds of items you want to sell –

• It needs to be small and light – Trust me on this, you don’t want to deal with the headaches that come with shipping furniture or kitchen appliances around the world. You want something that is going to be cheap to ship around, because shipping is going to eat your profit margins alive.
• It needs to be a simple item – What I mean by this is you want something that is simple to manufacture and has a relatively high margin of error. Most of these factories are not going to have the highest quality standards in the world, so the greater the margin of error you can put up with while keeping your customers happy the better. Competitive katana swords did not have a great margin for error before customers started noticing, as they were vigorously slicing sh*t with them all day (slicing rolled up Tatami Mats to be specific).
• Keep it in the $10-200 range – In my experience, it becomes very capital intensive and much riskier if you are selling items any higher than this. Higher ticket items are usually harder to ship, require higher quality control, and really magnify your mistakes when first starting out in importing. I have yet to find success outside of that price range, so I cant suggest you take any chances in it, but of course use your own judgement.
• Don’t sell what you buy – Devan made a great point when I was speaking with him that you can’t sell items that you buy. Most of us buy electronics, clothes, food, and other essentials. I can tell you right now that you are not going to compete in any of those markets. You really have to niche down in this and find a nice little nook for you to sit in.
• Don’t go seasonal – You want to find items that have a consistent base of buyers. I am sure there is a bunch of money to be made in selling Christmas stuff and winter clothes from Asia, but it is going to be extremely seasonal, and you are probably going to end up with a ton of worthless inventory.

What I would do is go onto a few sites and browse around –

• Alibaba – You should have this open already, but I often look around AliBaba to see what items are being promoted and check around the sites below to see what kind of margins I could get. For instance, right now there is a 4 year Gold company (online now!) selling LED Light Bulbs for $2.65/unit. Even better, they do Escrow, and have onsite inspections from Alibaba. I can quickly go over to Amazon and see these same bulbs selling for $9.50 – 11.99, a VERY healthy margin! And that’s just the first thing I looked at! There is a niche right there.
• eBay – Check out the completed listings on eBay to see what kind of prices you can consistently sell items for. I often use eBay auction descriptions also to gain some knowledge on a product if I see it is the exact same. Prices are the main thing here though, you get a really reliable indicator of demand. You have to click on the side bar menu to get to completed listings, here is a picture.
  
• Amazon – I go to this page and check out all of the different tabs for “Movers & Shakers” and whatnot. I click around the categories and drill down to find things I think may not have a lot of importers in already. Again, typically weird items, like LED bulbs, skateboard parts, and katanas do well, so I try to find weird things that catch my eye and compare them against stuff on Alibaba.
• Other tools – mySimon Top Searches, Shopzilla Top Searches, Kaboodle Hot Picks