Hi, this time we are going to talk about Sourcing.

Sourcing in China can be difficult for several reasons. First, not all companies in China have a website, for those who do, they are either very poorly made and extremely difficult to find and navigate. Most of them have little to none knowledge of Search Engine Optimization and thus it is impossible for you to search for them online. Most frustrating of all for foreigners is that most websites by Chinese companies are written in Chinese, thus you will not be able to understand.

For that reason, in my dad's office situated in China, he hires a team of 4 employees for the sole purpose of sourcing.

Ok, so what can you do? The easier way I suggest you to do is to look with online platforms such as www.globalsources.com and www.alibaba.com. Many Chinese companies are aware of these platforms and are members of it. Other than that, you can purchase trade magazines which are pertinent to the products that you are interested in, many Chinese companies also places Ads on them. If you insist on finding their company's website on search engine, do not look at google or yahoo, instead, look in Chinese search engine such as www.bidu.com and www.sohu.com. However this is not recommended if you do not read Chinese.

You can joint venture will a Chinese to do your sourcing, this method is probably the best one but also hard to implement. Attending tradeshows in China is another great way of sourcing but it may be expensive to start off with.

In the next part, I will talk about what do you have to be careful of when sourcing in China.