How to Find a Manufacturer in China?

There is No Magic Formula for how to find a manufacturer in China. There is a way to do this, but it’s not an easy and straightforward. Following the right process will most likely take you from “no supplier” to “right supplier”.

It would be best if you did your homework, provided the right information, and collected the right data simultaneously. Next, you will know how to get a Chinese manufacturer.

How to Find a Manufacturer in China?

How about getting a list of good Chinese suppliers? There must be, right? Yes, of course. Go to the Alibaba website, search among gold suppliers, and choose the best one in your product category.

No no. just kidding. In my opinion, it’s better than going all-out. As mentioned above, following the correct process is the most important thing. There are some things that many buyers will not accept and there is no good or bad supplier.

First, the general find a Chinese manufacturer is mainly the following 7 channels:

• Look for B2B Websites

You can find a China manufacturer on most of China online websites. 

Free Online Directories

There are still many outstanding Chinese manufacturers that have not appeared on B2B websites. These excellent manufacturers are renowned in manufacturing, but unfortunately, they don’t know how to promote marketing effectively.

A good place for finding a manufacturer for your brand is free online supplier directories. These directories act as manufacturer catalogs that contain profiles for hundreds or thousands of manufacturers, wholesalers, and suppliers.

Below, we’ve listed a few of the most popular ones for both domestic and overseas suppliers:

Some Online Over Directories

• ThomasNet
• Maker’s Row
• MFG
• Kompass
• Council of Manufacturing Associations Member Organizations
• Indiamart

Some Online China Directories

• Supplyia
• Alibaba
• wholesale Websites

• Visit Local Trade Shows In Your Area

There are still many outstanding Chinese wholesale manufacturers that have not appeared on B2B websites. These excellent manufacturers are renowned in manufacturing, but unfortunately, they don’t know how to promote marketing effectively. So, how do you quickly to find factories in China?

Trade shows are a great place to meet and socialize with people who are in the same trade. Discuss with them their journey as beginners and learn. They will give you great advice that you can apply to grow your business. You can learn more about money management and how to run your business.

In China, there is even a sizeable annual exhibition dedicated to purchasing tires. Buyers should consider what their priorities are and make a corresponding purchasing decision.

The Following Websites Have Trade Show Schedules:

• Trade Shows News Network

• Trade Fair Dates

• Events Eye Trade Show Directory

• Absolute Exhibits

• Find Someone’s Supplier

Even if vendor reviews of Alibaba and Global Resources help evaluate potential suppliers, a faster way to find a good China manufactory is to find out the supplier of a company.

For example, you can easily steal wholesale suppliers from your competitor by using Jungle Scouts.

Every shipping container entering the United States must be recorded before it can cross the border. In this process, each shipment information is detailed recorded at U.S. Customs.

All of this information is made available to the public free of charge. The tools for supplier data allow you to quickly browse every company’s shipments information when it be imported into the United States by sea shipping.

From this document, you can easily find someone’s supplier and their shipments’ size and weight. I think this information is beneficial to quickly and easily find the exact wholesale suppliers used by your competitors.

• LexisNexis
• Jungle Scouts

You also can find someone’s supplier through a company’s report information about customers, suppliers and market partners in press releases, conference calls and investor presentations that are found on the company website.

• Join Forums

Such forums are very educational. They will help you learn more about business and customer expectations. You can find such forums on social media platforms such as Facebook(group), Reddit or Shopify.

• Ask for Referrals

Do you know someone who is in the same business as you want to start? Contact them before getting started. Let them tell you the ups and downs of the industry, and share with you some tips. That way, you will begin in the right direction.

• Search on Google

In recent years, we’ve become accustomed to being able to easily search Google and find what we’re looking for in the first few search results.

However, many suppliers haven’t kept pace with the internet or Google’s algorithm changes. Their websites are usually old, sparse on information, and have poor search engine optimization.

So how do you find a Chinese manufacturer for your product on Google? For possibly the first time ever, you’ll need to explore page two of Google search results and beyond. You’ll also want to use a variety of search terms. For example, words like “wholesale,” “wholesaler,” and “distributor” may be used interchangeably, so you should search for all of them. 

It may help to make yourself familiar with Google’s search shortcuts to improve the quality of your searches and, thus, your results.

• Visit China Wholesale Markets

If you have certain goods suppliers in mind, just check the below sheet and go to one or two cities in China to find a manufacturer you want to cooperate. 

Also, most people’s common concern is the quality issues of finding a manufacturer from China. Indeed, Chinese manufacturer can offer high-quality products as long as you find a trusted wholesaler and make a reasonable quality control.

How to Get a Product Manufactured in China?

So, after finding a Chinese manufacturer or supplier, you generally consider what issues and steps to follow to get your product manufactured in China, managing the production process, or shipping your product?

Blew is the general steps for finding Chinese manufacturers:

1. Ask Specific Questions to Check Legit

If you use Alibaba to find factories, When you check whether the factory is legal, you may consider the following questions to ask oversea suppliers:

• Does their factory name have words like trading, industry, or technology?
• How many types of products do they produce?
• What is their business license?

When communicating with the factory, you should ask a completely different set of more specific questions. Here are some of the questions you might like to ask the factory the most:

1.1 Which Companies Have You Worked with in the Past? 

Although many good factories will not disclose who they have worked with, if sellers can understand most of the factory’s customer companies’ geographic location, they will have a good understanding of this factory’s quality standards.

Because most factories’ products are sold in the United States or Europe, their quality is generally higher than those sold in Asia or Africa.

1.2 Can I See Your Business License?

Although you may not understand Chinese, you can find someone who understands Chinese to review and check the Administration for Industry and Commerce of each province in China to see if the company is registered there.

1.3 Generally, What is Your MOQ?

Most factories want to produce more products because large orders can bring them more profits. However, if factories trust your brands enough, they are usually willing to start with a lower MOQ.

So the numbers given by the factory at the beginning may not be unchangeable.

1.4 How Long on Average Can Your Samples be Made?

Most people think that it takes several weeks to make a sample. In fact, for simple apparel products like shirts or hats, samples can be completed in less than a week. Depending on the type of product produced, the sample production time will vary greatly.

1.5 What Is Your Typical Payment Method?

Most factories’ payment method is 30% before production and the remaining 70% before shipment. In other words, before you actually receive your product, you need to pay 100% of your product.

To better control the product’s quality before shipment, you may visit the factory by yourself or send a quality control team. For large orders, wise foreign sellers usually hire a quality control team to inspect before paying 70% of the balance.

After knowing what questions to ask Chinese factories, you still need to learn how to manage production processes.

2. Explain Product Details to the Factory

Generally speaking, sellers know the specific specifications of the products they want to produce, including colors, materials, and logos. When they start discussing with the factory, they can discover the richness of product choices.

For example, you may want to customize the crown’s logo to the entire dial for a watch. Suppose you know the details of the design you want. This can save a lot of time and cost for the factory, including you, because the factory does not want to produce multiple samples because you forget the design details.

First of all, one of the most frequently asked questions by foreign sellers is: “Are you a factory?”

Secondly, the next question they are most concerned about is: “How much does it cost?”

Then you will calculate the specific manufacturing costs from multiple suppliers.

Once you get quotations from Chinese factories, you may need to know why the prices differ between different manufacturers.

“Why did one factory quote $3, while another factory quoted $6?”

There are differences in the quotations of Chinese manufacturers, and the main reasons may be attributed to the following four reasons:

• There is another cooperative factory behind the supplier
• Chinese suppliers think that you don’t know exactly how much you should pay
• The factory usually does not produce this product
• The quality of the products they have is much lower than the standard level

To understand the cost of manufacturing products, you should collect quotations from 3 or 5 factories.

3. Request the Factory to Provide Samples and Start Production

Foreign sellers will require the factory to provide at least one sample for each product to be produced. Getting samples from a potential Chinese supplier represents the last chance a buyer has to make changes.

Since this is your product, you have final say on whether or not to proceed with production, or make changes! Make it count!

4. Maintain Active Contact with the Factory, and Strive not to Fall Behind in Production

Once the seller confirms the sample, the next step is the production process. Even if the factory does not spend too much time on sample production, the formal production will also take a lot of time.

In order not to fall behind in the production process, you need to be aware of the following two points:

1. The cooperative factory has not its own supply chain. Each part of the product produced by the buyer may come from a different factory. For example, for shoes, the laces and soles may come from other factories; for bracelets, the raw materials and gems may come from other factories. 

2. You are not the only customer of the factory and may not be the most important customer. To stay ahead in production, you need to keep in touch with factories and build relationships with them. You need to deal with the sales representatives and start to pay attention to things other than production.

In the next step, You generally ask the factory to send photos to update the production progress. You want to know the schedule for the factory to produce each part.

5. Do Production Inspection Before Shipment. 

Chinese manufacture is legit and safe, but, in ISO compliance, regular monitoring of the raw materials being imported needs to be done, check-ins during the production phases and after the goods have been manufactured.

Understand China Quality Control Inspection Services

The main task of Product quality control inspection services is to identify problems and defects early to provide authentic products to consumers.

The following are the general types of inspection services are most buyers choose when they choose manufacturers in China.

Because of an overseas supplier,  you don’t know, and you can’t go there, you may want to contact an inspection agency to do the the quality control inspection of your products.

But you need to tell them when to go to the factory and what to check. I try to summarize in this flowchart for:

How to choose product inspection services.

6. Choose the Right Shipping from Chinese Agent.

Your Chinese manufactures can help you ship your goods out, but you have to learn how to Choose the cheapest shipping ways.

Determine the Incoterms and Shipping Methods:

There are 3 ways shipping from Chia method: Air express, Airfreight, and Ocean freight. All of them are legit.

The cheapest way to ship from China is Ocean freight. If you’re not sure how to find the best way to ship from Chinese manufacturers, we can help you figure out which option is best for you! Feel free to contact us for a free quote.

When it comes to legit shipping from Chinese manufacturers, customers often ask us what international trade term options should they choose.

Our typical answer is, “Most buyers choose FOB, so this may be what you want.”

But this is a bit short. You should understand in more detail how to choose the legit Alibaba trade terms option that meets your needs.

To have a deeper understanding of the general principles of interpretation of major Chinese manufactures legit trade terms, we have prepared the following flow chart:

China Manufacturer Conclusion

How to find a manufacturer in China? When you are looking for products to sell, your first choice may be to switch to Made in China because this is the most effective method and can bring them the highest profit.

The difficulty of manufacturing products in China is that you need to figure out who they should work with and manage the production process.

Finding a manufacturer in China can seem like quite a daunting task, especially if you do it for the first time.

But if you break up your job into piece steps and focus on each one of them at a time, you will be safely imported from China with your expectation.

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2 years ago

[…] Selecting a manufacturer with the following characteristics will increase your chances of success because finding the right manufacturer is not an easy job: […]

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