Selling to China

[jellybirddesigns]

Hi,

Hubby has recommended that I open up my products for sale to China.

I have restricted my sales to just a handful of countries, but just wanted to know if anyone has sold stuff to the Chinese and how it has been? I'm pretty reticent about sending stuff there, but should I be concerned or not?

[lyndal1838]

While there is probably no real reason for not selling to China, I doubt that it would make much difference to you sales figures.

Have you looked at the cushion covers being sold by Chinese sellers?   Even the expensive ones are less than $5.

[saarzi]

I havent sold anything from Ebay to China, but Ive been there quite a few times, and Ive done business with Chinese companies located in China for many years, and was employed by a Chinese owned business in Asia for a while.

Chinese postal system is extremely unreliable. I wouldnt even bother trying, unless youre using a courier - youll end up with a lot of lost items and forced refunds.

Secondly, what are you selling, and are you going to list in Mandarin? English is not taught in schools in China, and they really dont watch western TV, and theres no incentive to learn English there for the general population. In short, its rare to find Chinese people (in China) who speak english at all (even hello), let alone read it. Taxi drivers at the international airports, and most hotel receptions dont even speak English, even in Beijing and Shanghai, unless they are 5 star plus.

If you can get your listings in Mandarin, you could make a killing selling *original* high end brands (like Chanel etc) - they are double the price there than they are here, and tours are organised for the Chinese rich to come to Australia to shop for high end brands cheaply. But dont assume they speak English because they are rich, they usually dont.

There is also a market selling to expats in China, but it will take some work to get to know where they hang out, and infiltrate those groups and make a name for yourself - they can be pretty tight knit, but this is probably the group youd go for.

(I just noticed you sell cushion covers - they sell for about $1 each in China, they wont care if they are hand made, thats common over there. Are you going to try to sell cushion covers or something else?).

[clarry100]

Also when you are addressing mail you will need to be able to hand write the address in Chinese or it will never be delivered as their equivalent of posties simply cannot read English style writing at all.

[*tippy*toes*]

When I buy stuff from China it has 2 postage labels on the package. One written in English, the other in Chinese. It makes perfect sense to do that as it can be clearly read from both ends. I'm guessing they are like eBay labels, as they are the same regardless of who I buy from.

[clarry100]

We have actually decided to compete with the flood of Chinese sellers on ebay by selling other products back to them.

My wife is Chinese so we have a distinct advantage there.

She has just opened up a Wechat store and will sell highly sought after Australian quality known name brand products.

Their population is almost 70-times ours so there is quite a large marketplace over there just waiting to spend their money.

And there are more millionaires (in their money terms) than we have total population in AU.

But unless you can read/write/speak the language it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to do.

So its yet to be seen how it will go, but the very early signs are certainly looking good.

...and no we will not be using AU post for shipping. There are far cheaper and better solutions out there for sending parcels to China.

[englishrosegardens]

Wouldn't it be a bit like trying to sell ice to the Eskimos, unless you have a highly specialised or niche market? It reminds of a joke I once heard about a Jew winning salesman of the year by selling a milking machine to an Arab and taking his only cow as payment. Okay, it's not really relevant but I was reminded of it when I read all this.

[clarry100]

In the case of the products my wife will sell its kinda like a niche market.

In general the quality of local products like powdered milk, baby formula and health care supplements (and others) is very poor in China.

If they can find the imported products from AU they are expensive and there is a pretty fair chance that the real product has been removed from the container and some inferior subsitute has been put in place.

So once you can gain their trust that you will provide them with the "real McCoy" then they will pay good money to know that they are getting exactly what they pay for.

Getting known and gaining their trust is the big hurdle as its hard for them to trust sales people in this area.

But there are ways to do it.

So she is on the brink of launching the store and starting up the ad campaign.

[ourphonecase]

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@clarry100 wrote:

In general the quality of local products like powdered milk, baby formula and health care supplements (and others) is very poor in China.

---

That is true like 5 years ago, the companies really stepped up their game since then after the "fatality" of the babies years ago, but it is extremely hard to erase bad reputation once done.

Much like Malaysia Airlines.. That company got screwed over so hard

[digital*ghost]

Australia Post partnered with two of the Alibaba websites (one for retail, and one for wholesale to other Chinese businesses), they basically have the ecommerce platform on the respective sites, so I think the way it works is that you get in touch with AP and (if all the criteria is met, as I do recall there's some kind of application process), you provide them with the catlogue of products and it goes into the AP shopfront.

My knowledge on all this is really limited, though, and I have no idea how it all works, whether you get sales info directly and dispatch yourself, or if AP fulfil orders with provided stock etc, but here's the starting point for anyone interested in more info:

https://auspost.com.au/small-business/go-global.html

I doubt my products would do well.... 😄 I have sold to Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, but never to China.