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Sourcing from China: what products to buy in Q1

Danilo Faggiana

The Q1 (the first quarter of the Year) is considered the worst quarter for sales, especially online. Christmas Holidays are just over and people have spent a lot of money on gifts and food. For this reason, many wrongly assume that people are not going to buy anything in January and February. According to statistics, this is actually really wrong.

On the other hand, Q1 offers a big challenge to all the businesses that normally purchase products from China. In fact, the approaching of the Spring holiday might create a lot of sourcing and logistic disruption. For this reason, it is highly recommended to prepare your business in advance and decide in December what product are you going to source from China and then sell to your customers.

So continue to read this article to understand what people normally purchase during Q1 so what kind of product you should purchase to prepare your business for the New Year and how to face all the challenges related to sourcing from China and fulfillment.

How to choose the products to buy in 2023

People during Q1 spent money and purchased products as in every other quarter of the year,  the point is what they are going to look for? There are some customer behavioral patterns that come back every year and by analyzing them you could easily find winning products to sell during 2023.

New Year Resolutions

At the beginning of a New Year people normally look back to see what went wrong and make wishes for the New Year to come. They try to be better and improve themselves and this is what is called a New Year Resolution.

Survey data from Quicken reveal that 56% of people who make New Year’s resolutions are willing to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The potential payoff: Consumers in the poll who had invested in their resolutions were 25 percent more likely to have stuck with them for a year or more.

What are your 2022 resolutions? ( statista.com)

By Statista.com the most common resolution, was to get in shape. Approximately half of Americans wished to do more exercise and improve their fitness habits. In addition, 48% of them made a resolution to lose weight within the year. 

By following this statistic you can easily foresee what people are going to buy in January, for example: 

Another common resolution is to improve the diet and this can lead to:

Winter holidays

Between the end of January and beginning of February many people like to practise winter sports like Skiing, Snowboarding, etc.

This means that you can think of purchase:

Valentine’s Day (14th February)

Also known as the most romantic day of the year, St Valentine’s is the day when couples show their love and affection for their significant other by sending cards, flowers, or chocolates with messages of love.

Some of the most common gifts include: 

Carnival

Carnival, together with Halloween, is one of the most favourite holidays loved by kids and adults alike. It is usually associated with public festivities, such as parades, public street parties, and various forms of entertainment.

But most importantly, on this Holiday, we get to dress ourselves as our favourite fairytale heroes and favourite characters. 

Some of the most popular items that you can sell in this period are: 

International Women’s Day (8th March)

Another very important day is International Women’s Day. This is a worldwide event to honour women’s social, economic, cultural, and political achievements. 

The symbol of this day is the Mimosa Flower, so any items that represent this beautiful flower or show how much you appreciate the women around you are an almost certain win. 

Saint Patrick’s Day (17th March)

The feast day of St. Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint, is celebrated on March 17th. When Irish immigrants brought St. Patrick’s Day in America, it became a secular celebration of Irish culture. While this holiday is not officially recognised in the US, it is honoured as a celebration of Irish and Irish-American culture across the country. 

Since the colour green is prominently displayed, some St Patrick’s Day Products ideas could be: 

You grasped it, anything that is the right shade of green or clover-themed is good!

Sourcing from China during Q1

If you normally go sourcing products for your business from China, you probably already know that the Chinese New Year can be a great challenge for business, and if you want to get items during Q1 you need to prepare in advance. 

Chinese New Year Disruption

The Chinese New Year, also known as Spring Festival, is a nationwide Official Public Holiday in China that in 2023  will take place from January 21st (New Years Eve) until February 5th (Lantern Festival). 

While it might seem that one week of Holidays is not a huge deal, you have to keep in mind that disruptions to production can last up to a month.

An that in that period you won’t be able to contact your customers at all: no quotations, not check of all shipments, no new orders. Nothing.

Chinese New Year: Market Challenge

Suppliers will slow down the production of their items in the weeks leading up to the Spring Festival, focusing on leaving their warehouses as empty as possible. 

Keep also in mind that as goods start running short, there might be a price surge, since everyone wants to get the last stocks before factories close. This rise in prices could leave you with very little margins.

The same goes for shipping, every company will need to ship products before the beginning of the holiday season and this will increase the shipping costs.

After the holidays, it can take up to 2 weeks to resume production at 100%. This is because factories need to buy new raw materials and prepare the production line for the new requests that they received, while workers and administrators catch up with all orders that were placed during the Holiday period. 

Prepare for Q1 and Chinese New Year

If you want to purchase products to sell for Saint Valentine, Winter and in Q1 in general. It is imperative to prepare in advance a request for a quotation right now.

Remember that also if you purchase from a national distributor, it is highly probable that he will be sourcing from China so that he could have supplier disruption. In fact, according to data published by the United Nations Statistics Division, China accounted for 28.7 percent of global manufacturing output in 2019. That puts the country more than 10 percentage points ahead of the United States, which used to have the world’s largest manufacturing sector until China overtook it in 2010.

For all of the above reasons, if you want to continue trading your products in a brick-and-mortar store or only on your eCommerce without a glitch, you must start requesting quotes and placing your orders now. 

Rephrasing the famous American saying: “Location, Location, LOCATION!”, the key to success is “Preparation, Preparation, PREPARATION!”. Start planning for Q1 by:

Prepare for Q1: order some stocks with trusted suppliers

Once you decide what products you want to stock in, you must go ahead and sourcing from China the items as soon as possible. As we mentioned before, the sooner you get your orders in, the less likely you will be to trip over problems like out-of-stock products, price surges, and long product production times. The ideal would be to purchase a stock by the end of December.

Now the only problem is to find a reliable supplier who can follow you and assist you from the quote request up to the safe delivery of your goods to their final destination, which can be your home country warehouse, Amazon FBA, or to a different country entirely. 

Sourcing from China – Factories and Suppliers

Finding a good and trustworthy supplier in China is no easy task. Even if we skip the obvious communication issues – not many suppliers can speak and write fluently in English. How can you really test the quality of the products that you are going to buy or be sure that the factory exists and is really going to offer all the services that they promise?  

In the ideal scenario, you need to find a partner that can negotiate on your behalf with Chinese manufacturers, check the quality of your products before shipping them, and provide you with truthful information on shipping and customs costs. 

How Yakkyofy Can help you during Q1

In order to keep your mind at ease and keep your clients satisfied, you should choose a partner who will assist you throughout the Spring Festival and even after, helps your business to scale, while you enjoy the fruits of your hard work. 

Yakkyofy is an all-in-one solution that can help you sourcing over 12 million items from China. We operate on a daily basis with thousands of suppliers and can provide you with top-quality items at affordable B2B prices, with variants that could not be available on Chinese Marketplaces. Some of our services include: 

These are only some of the services that Yakkyofy offers to its customers. We will bring to your doorstep the crème de la crème of Made in China. 

All you will have left to do is simply do what you do best, sell your products, and enjoy the results because guess what? Q1 and the Spring Festival are no longer an issue for your business! 

So what are you waiting for? 

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