CHINA GENERAL

Because chinks are raciss and shameless. They don't want to buy products from foreigners anymore. Or they'll simply steal your idea and product. Most anything you could think of trying to sell in China is already being sold by chink sellers, and the market is already saturated.

And you won't be able to sell on taobao or anything like that anyway because you need a Chinese ID, which they don't give to foreigners, or they make go through other bullshit red tape

WHEW LAD

Can chinks even use shopify? sounds like bullshit

WeChat seems to be the best platform

I did a ton of research on certain plans to buy shit from alibaba and resell. in the end, the system is fucked. You have to pay import tariffs and do a bunch of government red-tape shit. Drop shipping seems like a better idea. Also, dealing with the factories is kind of an investment. You'll have to spend at least $500 to get this going. I canceled this plan because I realized there was too much risk manufacturing $500 worth of stuff I don't even know will sell.

Maybe see what other people have to say about it, but unless I am going to manufacture an original invention, I don't see the reward in the alibaba meme.

If I owned a store or something, yeah sure. But I can't justify buying $500 worth of say white label coffee or something to flip.

bump

I need glass pepper mills and Alibaba blows.

Anyone else have a source? I'd like to pay

I'm learning chinese right now and know some chinese guys from university but they don't seem like the right people except for one. Trading in china seems like a hard thing to get into but easy to sustain and very profitable as soon as you got your foot into the door.

>put limits on the number of these milk-powder purchases per person, because they were getting sold out too rapidly
Same in germany.

anyone know anything about investing in HK?

chinese business seems like madness
it runs on vast reserves of ignorance

chinese people are so gullible you can't sell legitimate products in china without being undercut by knock offs

"consumer protection" and "misleading advertising" doesn't seem to translate to chinese very well

I hear rumours that the chinese stock market is totally fucked, chinese companies trying to borrow vast foreign capital , debt held in clusterfucks of shell companies
de-valuing of the yaun, companies stockpiling instead of keeping capital reserves
not sure if truethough, or just western scaremongering

>be me
>buying some component parts from china
>they come all fucked up, 40% unusable
>and that's from a reasonably reputable company, not one of those warehouse phoenix
>send a WTF to the supplier, first he offers to refund me %60
>I remind him someone will have to sift through boxes of (tiny) parts to find the bad ones, which would cost more than the parts are worth
>he is like "OK all parts free if you re-order"
>figure I can't loose more if I'm not paying, and it's better than nothing
>get re-supply
>20% good parts
>20% bad parts
>60% tie bars (like for suits) wtf
>give up on supplier, but don't know what to do with hundreds of tie bars, don't want to be accused of stealing them etc
>let the supplier know and offer to ship them back
>"no no, is gift from company; we hope to do business with you in future"

and that is how I have several hundred poor quality tie bars in my room

FUCK YOU STOP GIVING PEOPLE IDEAS ABOUT MY AIR

if you can't flog $500 worth of product you aren't very good at business. yeah, the import tax to your country is a pain, but you factor that into your selling price to see if it is profitable. can't you find enough locations in your city that you could sell 200 bags/16 cases of coffee? you could even get a farmers market stall and sell coffee, chinese green tea and other "detox" or "cleanse" bullshit and make enough in a weekend to live off for the month.

why don't you look at Fulfillment by Amazon and you can work out the margins. find a product that sells and has little red tape. there are plenty. i know of lots.

there are plenty of good opportunities using alibaba & amazon, don't believe those that poo-poo it. they are either doing it properly & trying to talk it down or doing it wrong.

some Brits did the same, it is a recurring meme. wait until spring and then do it. make some fake orders and a few Weibo posts and then send your story to the Daily Mail and they'll print it & you'll get loads of orders.

politico.eu/article/germanys-chinese-investment-problem-sigmar-gabriel-eu/

How are they taking over the world?

what sites do chinks buy off anyway?

>blog.getchee.com/top-10-china-b2c-e-commerce-sites-2015/
>Below is the ranking of top 10 ecommerce sites in China in 2015 published by China e-Business Research Center.(中国电子商务研究中心) The new study indicates that Tmall was number one among all Chinese B2C retail websites for 2013. The site accounts for a 50.4% share of the B2C online retail market in China, followed by 20.7% of JD and 5.7% of Suning. Following No.4 to No.10 are Tencent (5.4%)、Vip(2.6%)、Amazon China(2.3%)、Dangdang (1.9%)、Gome(1.7%)、YHD(1.6%)、Vancl(0.8%).

TMall is the same as Taobao. it is the same parent company, you find some things on both and some things on only one. i don't know what the actual difference is. you don't find any counterfeit/shanzhai goods on tmall so i think the acceptance procedure might be more difficult.

if you are selling to chinese you want to be on taobao or have some wechat account which you can advertise and people can contact you directly. this seems to be increasing in popularity, especially for more expensive goods & imported goods.

cheers mate that helped a lot, none of my chinese mates know a fucken thing about china.

everybody who knows taobao , knows the fake shit is just like a drug that needs to be bought all the fucking time every minute every day bro.

love it... i guess.

great post

That's why you always do pre shipment inspections user.

I had several similar experiences before I gave up. You get a replacement, and half the shit is still broken. There's just no way to do this unless you have a friend in the country who can inspect everything closely. And even then, his time would be worth more than the amount wasted sorting out defective parts.

How do I sell to china?
what are chinese websites I can host my goods on?

>google it
ok

honestly, if you guys are going to have a general, you should make a pastebin.

Just make your own and pay a competent translator to administrate it.

I'm a white guy in Shenzhen, a mainland city near Hong Kong.

I'd be willing to inspect factories in the Guangdong/South China area for anyone interested here that live overseas, for a fee of course. Shenzhen is the number one cheap electronics manufacturing area of China btw.

bump.

how did you get into this?

Consulting around factories has been an interest of mine

i'm not that user. the middleman job is something you can just start doing if you are in china. you need a decent personality, people skills and either chinese proficiency or a translator.

i know of some african guys who do it for african businesses. african importers will contact them and ask for X, they'll find different suppliers, put them in contact and then become the face of the transaction.

Im throwing extra money from my side job while im at school in KNDI, is this smart?

announced a subsidy for Research and Dev this week

It feels smart but it had been steady tanking for quite awhile

I made a lot of money buying cast iron weight plates, importing (yes lots of red tape but deal with it) then selling them online through free advertising sites like gumtree or craigslist. You can add crazy mark ups and its tough to fuck up cast iron plates.

protip: dont

contracts and legal shit is just a paper with useless rules for them. if you are not a big fish expect chinese to fuck you whenever they want.

corruption everywhere even when you are paying for external services they make deals between them to charge you more.

they try to make you feel guilty all the time, they are the worst negotiators I ever met.

those fuckers talk about honor and shit but they never deliver any. THEY DONT HAVE A SOUL!!

interesting

I have good people skills (customer service my whole life), might look into it, im american and speak no chinese

Hey!
Im working in a forwarder company that is focused on import/export china and we sometimes talk to people from Shenzhen.
Im from germany btw.

do you know Jet Sky?

Bump

I enjoyed it, but I was there primarily as an English teacher so I was small-time enough that nobody I dealt with was corrupt. Just friendly people with great prices who kind of idolized westerners. I brought over art, simple cooking knives and fancy lighters just in my suitcase. They all moved very fast at a 100% markup.

Their investing behavior is even worse. They follow the crowd way more than we do, even when the crowd is obviously wrong.

I live in a third world asian country that specializes in raw manyfscturing on the cheap

The majority of companies here dont speak enough english to understand what they need to build or where to ship what

This kind of job would be perfect for me.

How do you suggest i get started?

I spent a year in China and have a rich Chinese friend that works in e-commerce and wants to buy everything I can give him, now that I came back to my country ,how do I start ?

which country are you from? tell him to contact me since you probably have no idea what you're doing... just joking, but I'm sure he'd like to buy products from other countries and diversify his ecommerce biz. can you post his wechat?

he doesn't want everything you can give him. he wants things that will sell.

you need to find items that you can sell to him that make it worth your time, i.e. give you a large markup per item, or items that he wants lots of with smaller markup but he'll take a lot of them and they don't cost a huge amount to ship.

you need to find out what can be exported easily and what needs a licence or forms to export. and then you need to find out whether it will pass chinese customs, and whether it will have a import tax applied (and what that will be).

then you need to work out how to ship it. how many you'll send, how you'll pack it, how it will be shipped. which ports you'll use, how it will get from the port to your friend, which shipping company you'll use.

tell you friend to make a list of 10 things he thinks will sell the best and investigate those 10 things. then get another list.

importantly: he might be your friend, but get the money before you send anything. no exceptions. ignore this at your own expense. no exceptions.

no exceptions. no exceptions. no exceptions. no exceptions. no exceptions. no exceptions. no exceptions. no exceptions. no exceptions. no exceptions. no exceptions. no exceptions. no exceptions. no exceptions.

so I found a product i want to dropship. i checked alibaba and found it, but it's too expensive, especially when considering you need to order a specific amount

wtf... i thought chinks were known to make and sell stuff dirt cheap?

are there similar websites like alibaba coming out of cambodia or vietnam where you can get shit even cheaper?

aliexpress is the consumer site, alibaba is for b2b/wholesale

>be me
>Chinese study abroad
>Land in Beijing, walk out of airport, smells like your uncle's cigarette stench apartment
>Look around, can't see more than a mile
>Find professor, "Ni-how user, it's never been such a clear day!"
>Apparently the last time they saw a blue sky was during the 2008 Olympics when it was mandatory to shut down factories.
>Get to hotel, am crosscountryfag, need to go for run
>Jog for 10 minutes, literally dying of cancer
>Starts raining, think it'll get better
>Rain gets in my eye, burns like lemons
>Skin in a coat that feels like thick oil
>Get back to cigarette hotel, jump in shower
>Cough up grey mucus
>mfw this is most of China

Think of every type of pollution that exists; water, trash, air, noise, light, whatever. Imagine it at it's worse on a large health effect scale.

I'm Chinese but my ancestors were the Nationalists, we didnt ask for this

let's say I had a product idea and needed ~100 pieces of product (one-piece plastic device/tool) to test the waters, would I chinked?

Australia and California already got this on lock. Small markets still exist, but the smaller volumes of goods sold is not worth the effort in my opinion.
My grandmother always asks me to bring wholesale-sized bottles of OTC meds and vitamins every time I visit China for business. She claims its for herself, but she actually flips it in her village and city dwelling. She's a good grandmother, so I just let it be *shrug*.

Got any schematics? Get it printed domestically, hop on a plane, or reach out to one of the many manufacturing intermediaries in the US that will get it built abroad on your behalf. The latter obviously costs more than "dealing" directly with China/Vietnam/India/Asia, but those US intermediaries usually own the factories or at least bankroll those factories. Thus, quality standards are practiced and enforced.

>Example b:
>>be ausfag
>>have friends in China who repeatedly demand a particular brand of aussie baby-milk powder
>>realize that these chinks will pay 8x original costs, plus shipping, for a particular brand essentially because a rumour went around about a particular element in it
>>thousands of ausfags literally make millions exploiting this demand
>>woolworths, coles, iga etc. have to LITERALLY put limits on the number of these milk-powder purchases per person, because they were getting sold out too rapidly
The reason for that is that there have been several scandals with Chinese powder milk over the past few years. Plastic (!) has been found in several brands of baby powder milk.

Kek
I left china 18 years ago and haven't gone back since

>I'm Chinese but my ancestors were the Nationalists, we didnt ask for this
they shouldn't have been cowards then.

but your story is just a story. i spent a summer in beijing a few years ago and it had blue skies almost every day. smog comes with low pressure, so the winters are bad. i don't think it is the greatest city in the world, but it isn't as bad and horrific as people make out.

How the fuck do you even sell to them though? Taobao and WeChat both require Chinese IDs for business accounts, it's fucked!

I used to sell on TaoBao - you either need a Chinese partner or you need to figure out a way to get a Chinese bank account for your alipay account. I used my passport to create my account while I was there. No idea what the process is like now.

Chinese people are very meticulous shoppers. I wouldn't use the word frugal, but when it comes to something like a cheap ass USB Fan... someone will spend 2 weeks figuring out exactly what fan to buy and who exactly they will buy it from. Then comes the haggling.

Unlike eBay/Amazon in the U.S. - if you can't haggle or answer questions about your shit 24/7--- you won't sell anything. Chinese WILL spend more money somewhere based on how much information on an item someone can provide.

what sort of things did you sell to them?

Can I, for example, sell a quality niche food product that they can't get in china easily or whatever and make bank?

forgo to mention: I'm already in china and have several Chinese bank accounts

if you can get an account on okcoin or huobi i have a solid plan that could be run

i have a huobi account. what is your plan?

i am selling on taobao aswell, chinese love the sex toys, a lot.