China is a hyper-competitive market, where many suppliers over promise and under deliver. They either overstate their size, the number of customers they have, their abilities, or their ability to deliver on time.
If the deal sounds to good to be true, it probably is.
Fast, cheap and high quality tend to be mutually exclusive concepts in reality. Our role is to manage your expectations by ensuring suppliers provide realistic timelines, and the best price for the highest quality.
There are many horror stories where the products received do not meet the customers expectations, whether its on the 1st order or the 5th order; the reality is that you need consistency in quality and delivery. The truth is that every importer runs into issues at some time, as that is just the nature of the China environment, buts it’s how you structure your sourcing from the start that allows you to avoid these many pitfalls.
Let Adapt fix or prevent your pain points:-
- Shipment delays
- Quality control issues
- Defective products
- Communication difficulties
- IP infringements
- Quality fade
- Price increases
China is a complex supply environment. Some of the typical problems encountered:
- Shipment delays – the reasons and the excuses are often endless… sometimes legit, but often not.
- Lost in translation – language and cultural expectations are very different, so mis-interpretation is common, and the end result is never good.
- Defective products – final product doesn’t match the samples or your expectations. This can be due to many reasons: from the production process, quality changes due to changing factories, or changing components without your knowledge.
- Quality fade – the quality of the product fades over time, as the factory cuts corners to improve margins, substitutes components, changes specifications, moves production to a different factory; the reasons truly are endless.
- No Returns – Get it right the first time – as once goods leave China, they are never going back. The red tape and cost of trying to send faulty product back is long and prohibitive.
- IP infringements – are very common as intellectual property rights are not strictly adhered to and often not at all and pursuing in the local courts is usually a worthless exercise.
- Surprise price increases – after your initial product success, the factory increases prices at a critical time and you are stuck between a rock and a hard place as you have invested serious time, effort and money.
- Impact of CNY – the entire supply chain is negatively impacted in the first Quarter of every year.