Many sellers we talk with have come to see sourcing as a time-consuming burden. This often leads to cutting corners and taking unnecessary risks, but it doesn’t have to.
This article shows how Checkpoint’s key services make sourcing from China as easy as ordering a pizza. When you don’t have to spend so much time on sourcing you have additional bandwidth to focus on product research, selling, and growing your business.
1. Selecting the right suppliers
With dozens of suppliers making similar products how do you make sure you are getting the best deal possible? One way is to talk to each of them individually about your requirements, get quotes, review samples, and specify your order details. Having fun yet?!
We estimate that online sellers spend approximately 30 hours per product from initial search through to placing an order with a new supplier. For someone selling multiple products or regularly trying new products, that’s a lot of time. If time = money, that is also a significant cost.
Checkpoint’s Request for Quote, Supplier Evaluation Interview, and Sample Review services, cost less than $200 and drastically reduce your time investment, while at the same time having the process professionally handled in a transparent way.
2. Ensuring suppliers are clear on your requirements
As we’ve written about before perception can only be defined by tangibles. Expecting “good quality” is taking a gamble. Your product requirements need to be clearly defined. Use the purchase order or a separate product requirement contract to provide clear details about your product. Checkpoint’s easy to use free PO Builder tool provides the framework to organize this information in a logical way and provide details you may not have thought to initially.
3. Getting production and quality you expect
Often buyers place their order and then book a pre-shipment inspection to check the quality of the goods before shipping. Fixing issues at this point takes unexpected time and money, plus the supplier must acknowledge the problem and agree to fix it. Better to avoid this situation.
Quality control begins well in advance of production. Checkpoint suggests checking samples before even choosing a supplier. Buyers have the most flexibility and least to lose at this point. To make it easy for you Checkpoint offers sample checking services for generic and custom samples. Finding problems in the sample phase reduces problems once it’s too late.
After starting production, use Checkpoint’s production management service to pro-actively monitor production timeframes. Know when delays may happen so you can manage the impact.
Once goods are ready, Checkpoint will conduct a Finished Products Check by randomly selecting goods via our video sampling process. Good are checked at our office against your requirements to avoid any unwanted supplier influence.
While most of these steps you can do yourself, sourcing is not where you provide the most value in your business. Your time is better spent on product research, sales, and marketing, and growing your business.
