Finding a great product is typically the first last place new entrepreneurs get stuck. If you don't know what you're doing, it's easy to get lost in the abyss of product research…
Luckily, this is also where I can help you the most 🙂
I'll show you how this works in a moment, but first let me tell you how I discovered this method…
My First Successful Product
When I got started, I went straight for counterfeits (purses, wallets, shoes, workout guides, etc). I made a KILLING selling these through eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, and in-person but quickly decided to get away from them. I didn't want to build a business on a questionable legal foundation, and you shouldn't either.
I gave away these counterfeit businesses to two different friends. One friend had a ton of success selling workout guides via Craigslist in NYC and delivering them by foot. The other friend one was not so lucky. He was hounded by lawyers and even private investigators, until he was eventually sued into bankruptcy (and had to give up all his fancy toys that counterfeits paid for).
And that's why you should avoid counterfeit products. Like dealing drugs I'm not saying it won't make you money, because it will. I'm saying you shouldn't do it because selling counterfeits is not a business it's a limited-time hustle. So don't do counterfeits…
Going ‘Legit'
Since I was already selling products online successfully, I figured it would be easy to switch from counterfeits to legit products. However, I found out finding legitimate products to sell is a much different game. I had quite a few failures before I began to figure things out.
Here's some of the bad products I've imported (and why they were bad):
- Patio Furniture Numbers looked incredible on these I could buy them WAY cheaper than they sold for. I bought sold 10 units, shipped them to the customer, but 2 units were damaged in shipping. All profit (and then some) was eaten up dealing with returns.
- Lesson learned: Avoid heavy oversize products that are expensive to ship.
Toothbrushes Again, the numbers looked great I could buy these WAY cheaper than their sell price. I bought 25 and people simply would not buy them. When's the last time you bought a toothbrush from a non-major brand?
- Lesson Learned: Avoid commoditized markets with high levels of big-brand loyalty.
‘Yes We Cannabis' Shirts Obama was running for office (Yes We Can), and marijuana legalization was a big topic so I figured, how could I fail with these? Didn't even test them, just bought 1,000 units (because I am smart like that). Sold 200 units, then ran out of necessary cash to continue marketing.
- Lesson Learned: Scale up slowly to keep inventory risk low retain cash for marketing/customer acquisition
I could go on all day about my early setbacks, but that's not what you want to hear about 🙂
Giving Up The Big Breakthrough
After hundreds of overwhelming hours spent researching selecting duds, I was ripping my hair out. I was trying so hard to find the PERFECT product one that would solve all of my problems. But all I was doing was losing money.
In a moment of desperation, I was about ready to call it quits. I was going over everything I had done, and all I knew was that it wasn't working. After many hours of thought, I decided that I would give it one more shot. I knew that the business model worked, and that I was clearly doing something wrong. So I decided to switch it up…
Up until that point, I had tried to find products in the way that most people do. I was simply looking for products that I could buy for much less than they were selling for online. But clearly, that was not working for me.
What I realized is that sourcing products is not the tough part. The tough part is finding products that you can sell consistently. So I decided to flip the entire concept on it's head, and instead try to focus on what people were buying. Instead of simply looking for cheap products from China, I was now searching for demand in the marketplace that I could sell into and then worrying about sourcing the product later.
Simply put it worked…
The first product that I worked for me were Motivational Pillows, which were cheap to ship easy to make variations. From there, I was on a roll. I sold all sorts of random products, from Competitive Samurai Swords to LED Lightbulbs and I was making good money with all of them.
Finding Your First ‘Beachhead' Product
You'll probably sell a collection of random products for a while, until you eventually stumble over what I call a ‘beachhead product'…
I use the term ‘beachhead' as a reference to D-Day during World War II. When the Allies invaded the beaches of Normandy, they secured a foothold in Europe and then expanded throughout Europe.
That's exactly what we want to do with our beachhead product gain a foothold in our niche and expand out into a full product line/brand from there.
For me, my first beachhead product was a specific airsoft gun. I stumbled over the product and sold a few, as they seemed to be popular. Immediately after selling these airsoft guns, I had customers emailing me asking for more. They wanted BB's, they wanted masks, they wanted vests they wanted to give me money for all sorts of things. So I happily obliged 🙂
Airsoft quickly became my bread butter. I eventually stopped selling most other products to focus specifically on my airsoft business, which was selling 15-30 airsoft guns daily right off the bat.
My First ‘Beachhead' Product
As I sold more, my relationship with my supplier kept developing and my prices kept getting cheaper. I was easily undercutting all my competition with a great product, and still coming away with a clean $10-30 profit per unit. And best of all, I didn't even have to touch the product my supplier even handled all shipping returns.
I had finally done it and it all snowballed very quickly. Hundreds of hours of frustration finally worked, and it worked fast.
That's Great But What About Me?
Now that you know my not-so-smooth journey, let's talk about how you can find good products for yourself…
Finding great products to import sell really comes down to these 3-steps:
BRAINSTORM > RESEARCH > SELECT
So let's get started…
Step 1a: Brainstorming Products
Your goal is to find a dream supplier for ANY product you are making money on, because then you can focus on growing the sales of your business rather than on customer service and shipping.
It isn't easy, but if you follow my advice below you will greatly increase your odds of finding a great supplier and product.
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, you DON'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.
Other than that, you are really free to explore whatever comes to mind.
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
Just keep looking through the market data on those sites and comparing it against what you can get from Alibaba. It may take some time, but eventually you will naturally learn what works and you will start finding great product opportunities left and right. If you really have issues finding a product, comment below or email me and I will see if I can help [will at startupbros dot com]
Eventually you'll find some opportunities that you want to move forward with. The next step is to start talking to suppliers and getting your hands on some samples. Don't worry, they all speak english (kind of)…
Indentify Mail Key Suppliers
Now that we have a product, we can start sorting through suppliers and contacting the ones that look promising.
All I would do is
Search for LED light bulb in Alibaba with the correct filters You should have already been doing this before to check your product costs in the previous steps. At this point though, we want to switch to searching for Suppliers rather than Products , as seen in the picture below. I typically start with filtering by Gold Supplier and adding Onsite Checked , Assessed Supplier , and Escrow in that order until I am down to 20-30 suppliers. If there are still a ton, that is fine. Just try to find some way to narrow it down to the very best and take the 20-30 top ones. Contact the good ones Now that you have a list of the prime suppliers for your product, you want to contact them and get some additional information. I usually just ask about their MOQ (Minumum Order Quantity), payment and shipping policies, sample policy, and a price list or product spec sheet. They usually have all of this on hand. IMPORTANT Don't use your personal email for this stuff, as it will be spammed into oblivion for years! Asia is not quite as serious about their emails as we are 🙂 Converse, get a feel for things Now see who messages you back and how serious it seems they are taking your business. Keep in mind that they are competing for your business at this point, and have no idea if you are looking to put in a $100 order or a $10,000 order. Their customer service at this point is a good indicator of where it will be in the future. Don't be afraid to haggle and engaging in some price warring, they are much more used to that in China. It isn't uncommon to see an item start at $200 and be sold for $20 in a Chinese tourist market. I could write a whole post on price negotiation, but the main thing with this is you have to low-ball your first counter offer to anchor the price possibility window at a lower level. You should get by fine with that. Samples! Ah, finally….the fun part! Now we get to put in some small orders to get samples shipped directly to us. I usually get samples from 2-5 suppliers I am considering, but never just one. SERIOUSLY go over these samples when you get them. Also take note of shipping times, costs, damage, etc. Put the items through some stress, check every last nook and cranny of them. Think about how customers will be using them and push the item harder. You need something that is going to stand up if you are going to put your name behind it, so find something to be proud about selling.
*Note on Minimum Order Quantities* I had a lot of people mention to me that the MOQ posted by many manufacturers is extremely high, so I figured I would paste my response here
The minimum order they list is generally not concrete, and is most of the time their average or desired order size. There is no way to know for sure without messaging the suppliers directly, which is why I go for 15-30 initially.
In my experience, Chinese factories will go through many hoops to work with you on order sizes, unless they are a MASSIVE factory that only ships via sea. If they use normal air shipping at all, they shouldnt mind sending out even a single item via air (which is what they do with samples anyways).
Again, with some items it will be different than other. For instance I looked into selling LED lighting that attaches to the sides of buildings, and the margins looked great, but the MOQ ended up being somewhere around $5,000 of lights due to the purpose of the item (to run down entire high rise buildings). I skipped over that one.
Another option is AliExpress. com, Alibaba's site for smaller orders. You will generally get better prices for the same amount on Alibaba if you are willing to put in the effort to communicate with suppliers, but AliExpress is always an option.
After all of this, you should have at least one solid supplier for a product you know will sell. Guess what's next…
