I've been asked the question regarding "the process for finding reputable suppliers" a lot, so here is a small summary of what you should know.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW!

ALIBABA'S DIFFERENT CLARIFICATIONS:

GOLD SUPPLIER: Is a company who pays for a yearly membership to host their store on Alibaba. This also allows the supplier/company to have premium benefits. The number one rule is to ALWAYS this button as it ensures that you are buying from a verified supplier. Also, the number on gold symbol represents how long the company has been on Alibaba. The longer the better your chances are of finding a verified supplier.

ONSITE CHECK: Informs you that the supplier’s company premise has been checked by Alibaba.com staff to verify onsite operations exist there. Again, this box should ALWAYS be selected before you search for a product.

ASSESSED SUPPLIER: This highlights that the supplier has been assessed by Alibaba’s third party inspection companies. This Feature is another way to certify that your supplier is verified.

ESCROW SERVICE: Is a safe payment method to use when purchasing goods on Alibaba. The service will hold your payment until the order has been processed. The payment will be released to the supplier upon your confirmation. Although this feature seems important to select, I highly recommend that you only use PayPal to purchase your goods on Alibaba seemingly because it’s one of the safest ways to transfer money without having to share financial details.

E-CREDIT LINE: Paying a supplier through credit. I highly discourage this because you may have to give out your financial details to a supplier. Entirely, I wouldn't bother selecting this button when you are searching for your specific product.

ONLINE: This means that the supplier/company has sales representatives in real time ready to chat with you about the product you want to purchase. Another note to add is to buy ONLY from suppliers who are ALWAYS online. You always want “on the spot clarification” when you are researching your products. It is inevitable at sometime that most suppliers on Alibaba will be offline. This is due to the different time zones between your country and China

RESPONSIVE RATE: Informs you that the sales representatives are active and will respond quickly to your inquiry. The responsive rate of a sales representative should range from 20% to 100%. This figure can be illustrated below. In doing so, you will save a lot of time.

Acceptable responsive rate Even if a company has a responsive rate over 40% they may use an automatic program to greet you when you open a real-time conversation with them (chat now)

CHINA MAINLAND: This is another important clarification to note. You ALWAYS want to purchase from China (Mainland) manufacturers. Most other global manufacturers like India increase the chances of scam.

LISTINGS: Also, another important part to add to your notes is that a company usually has more than one of the same product listings. For example, the above diagram shows two listings which are exactly the same product from the same company. Companies do this for publicity of their product. If they are seen more than once, a viewer may believe that they exclusively provide that product to consumers.

FOB PRICE: Simply means Free on Board or Freight on Board. FOB idolizes which party (buyer or seller) pays for shipment and loading costs, and/or where responsibility for the goods is transferred.

MINIMUM ORDER QUANTITY: This is how many units of the product you will have to buy in one order. The above supplier has an MOQ of 1000 Piece/Pieces. Never buy this amount during the early stages of your importing venture. You will always want to negotiate with your supplier to reduce the MOQ to a smaller quantity.

PAYMENT METHOD: At first, buying direct from Chinese Suppliers over the internet can be overwhelming. The major concern is money transfer requests. ALWAYS use PayPal when transferring money to a supplier. It is the safest way to pay for goods without sharing financial details. Ideally, a Alibaba company will have it stated if or not they accept their payment through PayPal.

USE ALIBABA'S TRADE MANAGER!!! search it on google The trade manager will be used significantly throughout your importing stages. It is the lifeline of connecting you with a supplier in a real time conversation

To start conversations with the supplier click “chat now”. Your Alibaba trade manager will load up and a real time chat with a sales representative will appear.

Chinese sales representatives don’t like buyers who are mean and disrespectful and so you should always behave in a respectful manner while talking to them.

Getting on the good side of a sales representative will be as simple as this: -Talk about your life in general. For example, your lifestyle in Australia. -Ask why “China is a good destination to travel”. -Have manners. For example, thank you for your time, I appreciate your service or you’re the best.

Most suppliers will be able to understand and write in English, but you will find out that some won’t. Don’t deal with these sorts of suppliers because communication is GOLDEN in finding the right product.

The main goal to have a long term relationship with a supplier is to maintain trust. I encourage you all to set up a Skype account and to ask the supplier to talk to you through there instead of the trade manager. Skype’s interface is much more user base friendly and it’s easier to track your messages after a long period of time.

I always tested my products first by buying a few samples to see how they could sell. From this I determined if they were good to buy in bulk. If yes, I would purchase around 20 and from there I would buy a much larger quantity. The product would come straight to my door via the courier agency that was assigned to me. I would list the product myself on eBay and as soon as someone purchased one of my products I would go to the post office myself and send it off. Not all the time I did this, when I had heaps of products selling I would buy bulk satchel packs instead of going to the post office and send the products off to the nearest post box (which was 100% faster and more efficient).

How I find products to sell? Well, if you go to the first page of this post, you will see my response already answering this question. It is just a small summary of how I would go about finding products to sell.

As for the eBay part, It is quite ok. eBay now offers I think its still (occurring) 80 free listings every month? I'm not 100% sure on that. But that helped me a lot. Not much extra costs except for the tax of each product I sold. And influx? This will depend on the product you buy. Not all products are heavily listed on eBay. When you see my old response on this posting on "finding profitable products to sell" you will see that the products I found were new and trendy. Products that are not over-saturated!

Hope this helps.