There is one very important thing that you have to understand and that is the B2B/Wholesale business model. To explain I’ll use a very simple example: When you purchase a product from a store, you are engaging in B2C transaction, which is basically business to customer transaction: The store sells your product in a single or small quantities for a fixed price for this example we will say that the to a sold a product for $20, but they still need to make a profit so obviously if they sold you a product for $20 they must have got it for is less lot less actually.
in order to get a discount the store buys their products from their supplier in a bulk or a wholesale this is called b2b or business-to-business transaction model in this example the store will buy products in large quantities for $10 each meaning they buy it for $10 and send it to you for trial which gives them $10 profit or a 100% profit margin.
When you use Alibaba you’re talking or taking a role of the store, which means that you are buying products in bulk, directly from the supplier and re-selling them in smaller quantities to your customers. I want to stress this – you cannot buy a single units of products from suppliers at Alibaba, even if they may seem as the best items to dropship. The reason why stuff is so cheap at Alibaba is because you are buying them from wholesale, in large quantities. No supplier would want to sell your products in small quantities every one of them is expecting that you are going to place an order of multiple units.
Depending on the product you could be ordering 10/15 or if it’s something like iPhone cases, you will be expected to order hundreds if not thousands of the products at a time. Alibaba is not a b2c site it is a business-to-business website. Your product or your buying products wholesale.
Simply put if a product is made manufactured or assembled anywhere in the world, you can find it and buy it on Alibaba.com. The first thing you want to do if you haven’t already done so is to create an account. I recommend doing this right away, in order to start building your profile. Even if you are not ready to buy anything it’s a good idea to create your account right away. To do that just go to the top left corner here click on the giant free barn and follow them stringent sections
One thing you will note in that is that when you are filling in the phones you will be asked to provide a business name. Don’t worry if you don’t have one at a time, you can make one up for the sake of simplicity. You also get asked if you want to be a buyer or a seller, I would also recommend using a professional email instead of your personal email, but it’s not a requirement. The reason I say that is because you will come off as being more professional and also you will understand in bombarded with a sea of promotional emails and discounts, which you can ignore because there are no such thing as discounts or promotions at Alibaba. Once you are all signed up you’re basically ready to use the site and start looking for products.
