The Truth about “Best Sourcing Companies and Agents in China”

The Truth about “Best Sourcing Companies and Agents in China”

The other day we were approached by a customer who says he found us from an article online entitled “Complete List: 50 Best Sourcing Agent in China”.

I was happy to hear that because I think that suggests that our sourcing agent company is well recommended on the internet and I gave this customer an amusing response hoping to put a laugh on his face, saying “To be honest, I think the article listed the names quite at face value because otherwise if they did enough due diligence BizShenzhen would come on more top position, haha!”

However, only till I tried to look through the link did I find out that it is an article posted by also a China sourcing agent company. Interestingly enough, when “recommending” the 50 best sourcing agents in China, they list themselves as the top agent above all the 49 others.

It means the article is written with the main purpose of marketing themselves and that raises a red flag on if the string of recommendations are really reliable at all.

Driven by surges of curiosity, I wanted to find out more listings about the terms such as “ Best China sourcing agents” and “Best sourcing agent in China”.

The results are intriguing!

The top 1 result comes from an SEO company, they narrowed the “recommendations” to a smaller number, “Top 20 Best Sourcing Companies and Agents in China”. I thought to myself, if this article is so much on top, there must be a lot of benefits of getting listed also up there, so I tried approaching them to ask how they listed a number of sourcing agents. After speaking with their “founder”, actually a chat robot in the beginning, I was told to get listed there is easy, I can pay 200USD per month to get listed on the bottom and 2000USD per month to get listed on the 2nd place. I guess the listed sourcing companies didn’t pay to get listed there, and they were used as information for this post to rank high for the keywords.

The 2nd ranking result comes from the same link my customer said they were referred to, the sourcing agent company that listed themselves as the top 1st above all 49 other peers.

The 3rd result comes from a shipping agent company who further narrows down to “Best 10 China Sourcing Agent to Help Your Sourcing from China” and they claim to know numerous sourcing agents but I know these agents would never go to this shipping company because there are countless local international shipping agents that cost way cheaper.

So what is this “Fortune 500” sourcing agent fluff all about?

It’s because all these top ranking sites have their own agenda, the 1st to promote their SEO services and ads services, the 2nd to pitch their own sourcing agent services and the 3rd to campaign about their shipping services. To do that they find out listing the top a couple of sourcing agents would help them a great deal in ranking for the essential keywords like China sourcing agent.

Truths about the listing of Best Sourcing Companies and Agents in China

1.The person that lists the names of the agents have little knowledge about what these agents are like and simply list the top few names on the keyword itself and try to disclose what they claim to know but actually at face value. Their only goal is to rule on the authority for this keyword and achieve their own agendas.

2.The entire concept of sourcing agents actually is a really narrow term derived from trading companies, whether or not disguised as manufacturers, who source and supply to the international buyers that simply need a conduit to import from China. When most trading companies find out it is getting harder and harder to do “sourcing” businesses because they could easily get spot on as traders(after Alibaba hosts more and more real manufacturers), they will gradually narrow down to certain industries focus on their own niche because in this way they can have the most stable supply chain and keep their grounds in the international business. The chance for the international buyers to be comfortable with dealing with middlemen shrunk a lot for quite a long period of time until there is a soaring demand again after the rise of e-Commerce giants including Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Oberlo, etc.

I did not find about it until years after I decided to become a sourcing agent when one of my happy international customers recommended the idea to me.

The whole presence of sourcing agents is still really small and most of these agents don’t know each other at all, and they are still dabbling far away for this scope of business to become mature enough for the top few players to be spelled out.

3.Therefore the conclusion is the so-called top few recommendations for best sourcing agents in China sheds little value and should not serve as authoritative information for decision making when it comes to interviewing the potential sourcing agents.

What you really need to observe to decide who are the best China sourcing agents

First of all, there is no real sense of “best sourcing agent” but only the most suitable sourcing agents, just the same as you cannot expect to know who are the best Chinese suppliers for a certain product, for example, the state-of-the-art factories used by Uniqlo and Apple are the best choices for themselves but indeed not going to work at all for small 99% of the international buyers.

So the concept of best sourcing agent is a paradox, but the most suitable sourcing agent is not. There are several important factors you can take into account for your decision making:

1.Try to deal with the owner.

It can be either a small or big sourcing agent company but the difference between getting the attention from the founder or owner of the company is huge.

If your procurement projects are all within the care and attention of the owner, you are more likely to secure success and stability for your projects because the owner can make decisions easily for the new products, supply, price, delivery time and warranty. But if you only get to speak with an employee of the sourcing company, the contact may be able to claim many things to make you happy and place orders but he or she may not know if their company really has the capability and capacity.

2.The quality of communication.

The quality of the international buyers’ communication experience relies on the agent’s response in many aspects: response speed, English speaking and comprehension skill, punctuality, global understanding on the western society and culture.

You may hold higher expectations than reality because in most cases you may be highly impressed with how amazing the sourcing agents websites look like and assume you are with an ambassador for China sourcing but could be much disappointed by the fact that the people you connect with communicate just as the same as the mainstream suppliers on Alibaba.

3.Protection on your product ideas.

Whether an agent promotes other customers products says a lot about whether or not a product idea you found after spending thousands of dollars would be equally shared to their other customers.

Try not to pry for what your agent is supplying to their other customers because that would make the agent think by default your product ideas can be spelled out to other people in the same manner.

If you have an agent that doesn’t disclose what their customers are doing, prioritize them because they might have the fattest chance of becoming real business partners with you.

4.Commercial acumen and negotiation skills.

If you need a sourcing agent that works on or with any of the suppliers you found by yourself, it would be important for the candidate to have acutes sense of commerce and be able to act more as an ambassador than a servant.

I personally have an American client that I do consulting for over 12 months, she and her supply chain manager and the contact point of our supplier are all females, we hold conference calls every week to discuss 2 of her projects that take myriads of trials and errors due to the very high level of customization of the products. Because there were too many moving parts, delayed delivery for information and shipments from time to time tend to drive our ladies crazy, clashes among them become daily. But as a gentleman, I am always willing to listen to both the client and supplier, find out where is the misunderstanding, and lead the two parties to resolve the differences and always come back together as team.

My role of being both a consultant and an ambassador becomes really valuable in the relationship and I owe what becomes of me to my past experience working in 2 factories as a sales and my cross-cultural exposure in assisting at least 15 global customers in their sourcing trip in China from the year of 2016 to 2017.

5.Personalized solutions.

Every customer is different and so is their requirement. Whether or not the agent is willing to operate flexibly with you personally shows how seriously they want to develop the business relationship with you, how intelligently they can be in creating value for the customers and the level of service quality you are going to receive.

Some customers may request to deal with the factories directly, some okay with transacting via the agent, some may just need someone as a consultant to help with coordination, some may just request arranging an inspection process, some may request merely the contact info of a supplier, some may just need help with freight forwarding, etc. There should be no 1 set of fixed formula to tackle the diverse needs in face of the multifaceted global customer needs.

6.Friendship

What is an agent? An agent is a proxy, it is another self. There’s no better way of managing a sourcing agent better than forming a friendship with them, bordering on brotherhood or sisterhood.

Give praises, show appreciation, invest trust, pay visits(though not recommended during the Covid era), organize Zoom calls, send wishes, you are not just doing business with China but also developing a fulfilling cross-cultural experience with another good-willed human being.