How to Use Alibaba Trade Assurance
After you got your samples and if everything looks good, you are at the stage of placing your final order with the suppliers. As we have talked before, you have filtered out suppliers with trade assurance, so today we gonna show you how to use alibaba trade assurance to place your order.
Table of Contents
What is Alibaba trade assurance?
First, what is trade assurance? Trade Assurance is a free service offered by Alibaba that’s designed to help create trust between buyers and suppliers. Trade Assurance covers you in the event of shipping or quality-related disputes.
Alibaba trade assurance review
The seller can invite the buyer to review the order within 30 days after the order is completed, or the buyer can evaluate the order within 30 days after the order transaction is completed.
(If the buyer does not comment after being invited to comment, the seller can copy the link in the store where the comment management is located, and then send the link directly to the buyer)
How to use Alibaba trade assurance?
You can start your order with trade assurance in different ways. For example, you can go to the Alibaba page and just click this orders button here, then chose order with trade assurance, it will lead you to this page to fill out your supplier’s email and your order info. Another way to do this is to ask your supplier to create this order form and send it to you through Alibaba.
Another way is that , you can go to your messages page, and find your chat history with the supplier that you want to place your order with. Then click the start order option here. Today I am going to use this way as an example to show you how the process works.
Let’s say I want to place my order with this supplier. I will just click this start order button and this order information page will pop up here.
The first thing you need to fill out here is the product information. You can chose this add products option here, you can see all different product options from this supplier and just chose the one you have communicated with them. Or if you are developing a new product, you can chose this add unreleased products option, here, you can upload your designed product pic and the product name and here you can put the quantity and unit price that both you and the supplier agreed with. If you have any other specifications that you need to list out , there is also an add specifications option here too.
This is the add contract option here. This is very important for you. It works like an evidence. The Alibaba Trade Assurance coverage is based on the details that you and your supplier agree in your purchase contract.
You can’t start a claim for late delivery unless you specify a delivery date for your order.
You can’t start a claim for product quality unless it’s against a specific and measurable detail, as laid out in your contract.
For example, you can’t say the colour is wrong unless it’s specified exactly what colour the products should be in your contract.
And you need to be as accurate as possible – don’t leave anything up for interpretation! If you’re ordering some children’s tablets and you say “long lasting battery” and they arrive with 2,000 mAh batteries, then there’s nothing you can do.
However, if you specify that the tablets should have batteries that are at least 3,000 mAh then you would be able to make a claim!
You need to be as specific and detailed as possible in your contract.
Specify all of the following:
The shipment date
The size of the product
Quantity
The materials to be used
The colour
The packaging
The branding
etc.
Ok, once you finished all the product relate info, the next part of the order form is shipping. Make sure you did your research and compare the shipping price provided by your shipping agent and the supplier. If you decide to use your own shipping agent and your supplier agrees to ship your goods to your shipping agent or agrees that your shipping agent can come to their factory pick up your order, make sure you have discussed with your supplier about what information to put here about all these shipping information here, including the shipping address, shipping method, trade terms as well as the shipping fee, etc.
If you decide to use the suppliers shipping method, you just need to put your shipping address, and similarly, put the shipping method, trade terms and shipping fee that you and your supplier agreed on. Then fill out this dispatch date, you can chose ship in certain days after supplier receives the initial payment or balance payment, typically, you will chose balance payment here, but again, it all depends on your agreement with the supplier. Or you can directly specify your shipment date here.
Alibaba trade assurance payment
Next you move to the payment. For the initial payment amount here, most of the suppliers will charge 30% of your total order amount. And all the payment method listed here are methods that Alibaba can accept. Chose one of the methods and move forward with the payment. There might be transaction fees associated with different payment methods and you can learn those details during the payment process.
I want to talk about the value added service here. This is a product monitoring and inspection service provided by Alibaba. If you click here, you can view more detailed information about different plans. I personally won’t recommend you use this directly if you have a high requirement about your product quality. You want to hire a very profession third party agent to help you to a maore thorough and comprehensive quality inspection, where you can make a list of every details that you want to check. Such as labeling, shipping marks, product bundling, color accuracy and a lot of more. They have more professional inspection equipment and inspection people to do this job much better.
How to apply Alibaba assurance refund?
If you receive the goods, at this time, you should check the quality of the product as soon as possible, because the button for applying for a refund will be closed after a certain time. You should check it in time and contact the seller if you have product quality problems.
However, when you receive the product, Alibaba assurance refund is not an easy task. You will spend a lot of time communicating with the supplier and Alibaba over and over again. !
Basically people must understand that one must have a detailed PI and order contract if he wish to be able to get any funds back, Alibaba does send inspection team to check but the supplier has a list of excuses up his sleeve. only a detailed order and clear communication history will help you refund from Alibaba trade assurance.
We will talk more about the pre-shipment inspection to let you avoid this situation as soon as possible.
