On Price and Quality

                                            Originally Written by Joy on 21/8/2015

In this diary, I am going to talk about Price and Quality especially for Chaozhou business.

After being in the export business for years, we have dealt with numerous clients from all over the world.

Some clients enjoy bargaining. They spend hours only trying to cut the price down several cents. Sooner or later, those customer will complain that they lose more ultimately due to bad quality or postponed delivery.

Smart clients focus more on quality. They emphasize that prompt delivery and stable quality are of priority.

Some clients always try to work with new factories and find cheaper goods.

Smart clients prefer to work in a stable way with reliable factories only and are very cautious in working with new suppliers.

A mature businessman always keeps good ratio of price and quality. He never try to find the lowest price in the market because he knows there must be a sacrifice somewhere.

There is a true story; one of my previous Greek clients Karafina（almost bancrupt）always urges us to find the cheapest toilet stocks in Chaozhou. The target price is less than half of market price.

After checking with many suppliers, I told him it’s impossible. Even for stocks, only porcelain is stock, all seat covers and flushing system should be new. So stock is usually around 30% lower than market price.

Still the client insisted that opportunities will come. He commented some factory may go bankrupt and should be willing to sell cheap. One day, he told me excitedly that he found an on-line supplier who really offers half price for a popular two-piece toilet.

We went to the supplier, a small trading company which didn’t registered officially, the toilet sample was surprisingly good quality and with expensive seatcover. Immediately the client placed an order of a 40HQ and paid deposit.

After one month, the supplier told us goods are ready for shipping, we went there and check the toilets.

1. The seatcover was not the one we saw before. When we pointed this out, the boss laughed at the client and said “Are you naive? such low price can never go with expensive seatcover! The seatcover in showroom was only a sample to indicate that there will be a seatcover. If you like that expensive seatcover, you should pay extra several dollars. ”

2. All toilets are with printing logo on porcelain, not laser logo. The printing logo will fade away quickly and make the porcelain look dirty. Again the boss said there will be an extra charge for laser logo.

3. The client requires the supplier to put some labels and stickers on porcelain and an instruction paper inside the carton. The supplier again asked for extra charge.

4. Most of the toilets are found leaking, therefore we requested the factory to unpack and rework. However the supplier refused and said he will lose money if he hires labors to rework. So finally the client asked us to hire several part-time labors to unpack all cartons and select the defects out.

5. In final delivery time, the supplier insisted that the client should pay the balance before loading goods. And the boss complains that the client is too fussy.

After finishing this order, the client regret working like this, and brought up so much trouble. You can’t say that the supplier try to cheat the client because it’s true that the price he offers is reasonable for the quality he provides.

One golden rule, buy cheap buy twice, goods lower than market price is tricky and risky !

The End