A friend from America told me about her experience of buying body massagers from China.
She expressed that the toughest part of bulk buying from China is Communication.
This surprised me because most sales staff are well-educated, some of them studied International Trade as their major in the university, some even studied abroad, and their English passed CET-6 or even 8 tests.
1. Conflict between electric massager factory and customer
2. Value of handheld massager trading company
1. Conflict between electric massager factory and customer
1.1 Service and quality of small massager manufacturers are quite different,
especially those with high MOQ, their sales representatives’ levels are varying, the good ones do offer great service, but sometimes the overseas customers would get screwed by the unresponsible sales staff.
1.2 Overseas customers would need multiple vibrating massagers suppliers.
It’s out of common sense that brand manufacturers, distributors, dealers, private label customers only work with one factory, normally they work with a few makers, some of them are backups, some of them are main suppliers, surely customers wouldn’t tell the main vendor that they have backups.
1.3 Communication
In the point of my view, communication ability is a top sales staff’s greatest competence. But only a few sales in the factory with the ability. Why? Because manufacturing companies tend to pay more attention to barriers of the factory, like therapy massager products development, and personalized items, rather than be kind to salary, commission, and bonus. It turned out to be many excellent sales staff hopped for a higher raise job.
Keeping the competence of smooth conversation with customers, solving customers’ various problems at any time, especially after the pandemic, and helping customers with one more step, would take customers’ trust value to the next level.
Customers care more about collaborative spirit, trader or factory doesn’t really matter.
For example, you are a grandmaster in the massager industry for years, although you are a vibrating massager trading company, you can find 20 reliable rehab massage plants for your customer within one day, is a factory capable of this?
2. Value of the rechargeable massager trading company
I overheard some customers only place orders with trading companies, and leave the balance to them to deal with. Because they trust them.
What could a mini massager trading company do for them:
*Sampling:
-A vendor might take one week to talk with you about sample charge and freight;
-After this problem is solved, your factory might mismake your Pantone color and waste another week to make a new one;
-Sample parcel returned after 3 days because they don’t have an MSDS certificate.
Until they drove you mad, one month lost, you got nothing but missed campaign.
*Coordination of factory’s production, following up and back up factories;
Only man who deals with vendors understands how long and hard the road is….
*QC
Without QC before shipment, you might receive multi speed massagers in your warehouse like:
Different color as the sample you approved;
Barcode of mini wand package is not scannable;
Less quantity than order;
Shipping case of peanut massager broke;
No compensation because you paid in advance…
*Arrange shipment of personal massagers
-Loading as more as possible physical therapy tools from different massager makers in one container to minimize empty space need some skills and experience.
-Picking a good forwarder or shipping company would guarantee the cargo will arrive your warehouse safely and in good condition, sometimes saving a bundle of freight cost.
*Various urgency problems, allocation, integration resource.
Do you worry about your portable massager orders production, delay shipment every day OR you can sleep well because your vendor handles everything for you quite well?
- The most important part: Save time and energy
Just like the information we got from the shipping company:
That most shippers of medical massagers are trading companies rather than mini body massager factories, the reason speaks here.
E.g. A 40’HQ container includes 5 factories cargo like bullet massager, electric back massager, hand held massage tools, magic massager, massager electric, the capable trading company can do milk run. But the medics massager factory couldn’t do the job.
Often our customers would buy from many mini massage factories, everyone’s mini vibrator articles are simple, they need a trading company to allocate, consolidate and load containers, declare export, distribute the payment, etc.
And another point is efficiency, time is also efficiency. For many American and European customers, the reason they work with multi speed vibrator traders is to save their time instead of emailing with every vendor. Everyone knows the communication cost might be higher than rechargeable massager products costs. If one can find a small massager agent in China to deal with many Chinese vendors, saving time for himself to do more local business, isn’t it cool?
So, the value of therapeutic massager traders is greater than factories. Many trading companies are running better and better, eventually, they’d set out from brands, design, technology, R&D, and make their own world.
Could we say that Apple is not a trader? After all, Apple doesn’t have its own factory.
But be on the ball, not all therapy tools trading companies are nice and active.