Summary: Craig Ford is an import and export market expert with a long history of success. Craig has spent virtually his entire working life in different companies related to importing and exporting of goods. Prior to setting up his import education platform, My Import Label, Craig and his team recorded over $20 million in export sales. Craig has extensive experience in importing from China, India, Vietnam, Malaysia and a whole bunch of other regions, as well as expertise in private labeling products. Greg: Craig, really, it is quite a unique skill set you have there, and certainly an area of huge demand with the rising rise of e-commerce at the moment and also eBay as well. My understanding is that you first got started importing when you were backpacking around the world. How did that come about? Craig: I did the usual Aussie thing, which is put on a backpack and head away for a couple of years. Australia is a long way from anywhere and when you're backpacking you tend to get off the beaten track a bit. When you're travelling you tend to find lots of interesting products that you think, “I haven't seen that before. I wonder how that would go with selling it back home?” I was already used to selling in Australia through weekend markets, so it was pretty easy for me to grab new products and send them back or bring them back with me and test them out. It was all about finding unique stuff that no one else has got ideally, and then making sure that there’s some residual value and a good margin on it. Greg: The first question for many Internet Marketers and upcoming Internet Retailers once they've chosen their product and market niche would be where online can they find genuine suppliers who are legitimate manufacturers rather than just product distributors? Craig: In the last three years, Alibaba has come of age and there are a couple of other sites like Alibaba. It's easy to find suppliers, finding them is actually not the issue. The issue is being able to sort through the genuine manufacturers from the tons of trading companies, sales agents, wholesalers and other brokers that are out there. Unfortunately, Alibaba has taken a bit of a back step there. Once upon a time, you could do an advanced search and filter those guys out. It's not as easy to do that anymore. So it does require a little bit of skill to be able to weed out those guys. Certainly one thing we encourage our clients to do is just to take the information that's posted online at face value, much like you would do if you were on a dating website. When you see a profile of someone or a supplier you might like, by all means have a chat with them and see what they're offering. But it's quite another thing to place a commercial order just on the information posted online. So we encourage our marketers to go through a whole lot more steps before they go and place that order. Greg: Craig, from your experience, is there a definite right way and a wrong way to approach a supplier professionally so as to not come across as an amateur importer? Craig: There is a low level of trust initially, so you've got to go to another level to show to the supplier that you are serious. There’s a few basic things you can do such as: Contact them with your own domain name rather than a hotmail or a Gmail type free email account. Already have an online presence setup so that they can look you up and make sure that you are an actual business. Include a positioning sales blurb in your initial inquiries about who you sell to and the volumes you are currently doing and where the business is headed. Just let them know, ” I'm a major retailer in XYZ Country, I sell to all of these markets at the moment, I'll be expanding into these markets” etc. The key is to get them to see you as the real deal, but also look beyond the initial discussion and look at the long-term opportunity for you.
