Sourcing products from AliBaba.com may not be the best thing to do

Sourcing products from AliBaba.com may not be the best thing to do

Sourcing products from AliBaba.com probably isn't the best thing to do after you read though this discussion.  Now if you've been keeping up with all of my posts, I know there's a lot lol, you may have come across a couple discussions where I mention that I've been working on a physical product.  Well I still am and I was set back slightly because of one simple reason... Shipping costs

I was all set up and ready to go, I just needed one more thing and I could get everything started up.  I had sourced every other item I needed and I actually have them sitting in my basement, but I wasn't satisfied on the last item I needed.  I purchased a few through Alibaba.com because I basically paid for a single piece and paid the shipping cost to get the item to my house so I could check it and test it out prior to investing more money into it.  I found the product that I really liked and I was ready to purchase at least 100 of these things, but then it felt like I was hit out of nowhere when it came to the shipping cost.  Now to get the samples to my house from China it cost me around $15, which isn't a bad price.  I then wanted to get 100 of these things and quickly realized that the shipping of $15 was standard for EACH ITEM!  Most places you purchase from you will pay a base shipping price and it doesn't increase much for each additional item.  With Alibaba.com you have to pay the standard price for every single item that is shipped to you, which is insane.

So I was shopping around on Alibaba.com because their prices were extremely affordable and that's what I needed in order to be competitive with my competition.  Purchasing from them let me drop the cost per item drastically and I was going to take over my niche, but then I got hit with the $1,500 shipping cost for 100 of the products I needed....  Basically I could just go down the street and purchase 100 of these for the same price that it would cost me to get them from Alibaba, and I would have them right away and not have to wait 3 weeks to get the product.

Now I still can make a really nice product with just purchasing what I need from the USA and having it either shipped to me for a small fee or just going out and purchasing it from the store, but my profits per item won't be as high   I have a really good strategy in place to take over the niche, but it will take a longer time frame since I'll have to invest much more money into it creation of my product.


I did find out that if you had a shipping container in China it's much cheaper overall to get something delivered to you because you're paying a basic standard fee to ship the one container.  But that would require a much larger investment to either rent or buy a container and ten you'd have to pay at least $5,000 to ship it to your location.  Sure these containers can be huge and hold a ton of inventory, but can you afford to fill it and then ship it?  Probably not   I tried working out a deal with the manufacturer and just getting them to ship the items to me at the cheapest rate that didn't require a shipping container, but they said they only do express freight for smaller items (insert face palm here).  I know there are loads of shipping options, but they just don't want to send them that way because they won't make money on the shipping costs grrrr.  Well, that's my assumption at least lol.

What I needed was around $2.50 a piece through Alibaba.com and around $5 to $7 if I bought in in the USA where I live.  The shipping per piece through Alibaba was roughly $15 which would mean each piece would cost me $17.50.  Now if I purchase them in the USA where I live, and where the prices are higher than China, it would cost me $5 to $7 per piece and $5 to ship.  If I purchase each item through Alibaba.com the shipping is $15 for each piece while shipping in the USA had a type of sliding scale that reduced the overall shipping per piece the more you got.  I could actually get 100 of these through Alibaba.com for $1,750 or I could get them through a manufacturer in the USA for under $1,000


For this simple reason, the freight shipping requirement, is why it isn't always a good reason to source your products through Alibaba.com   I did months of research to find the right products and I don't know why I never thought of asking the shipping costs of 100 or even 1,000 of these specific items


In Conclusion:
I'm still going to launch my physical product, it will just take a little longer to do since I have to invest more money into it.  I will have to start the whole sourcing process over for the last piece, which should take a few weeks, and then I should be good to go   You should always get the lowest price paired with the highest quality of a product if you plan on launching something of your own, but it isn't always easy to do.  I've found out that AliBaba.com isn't the best place to do this and I hope you don't waste your time like I did



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Thanks!

Razzy