How IMEX 360° Sourcing Service Can Cut Your Costs

IMEX 360 Service is fundamentally a service that helps other businesses grow.

Our most important feature is that we help you achieve maximum scalability and growth by saving you money and time in many kinds of ways.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways IMEX Sourcing saves you money.

Access to lower prices

• We are able to get access to lower prices than someone sitting in a different country sourcing via online platforms or even trade shows.
• This is due to factors like being able to speak Mandarin, ability to work with relationship factories or finding factories through Guanxi (关系, the best translation is “connections”).
• These are important factors in China, due to the significant language barriers and a relationship based business-culture.
• We have had cases, where we have been able to reduce products costs from anywhere between 5% and 15%.
• However, it is important that “cutting costs” is never the primary reason for hiring a sourcing and QC company and always secondary to QC and compliance.

Reduced Return Rate

• This is perhaps one of the most significant cost savings that we help you generate.
• We have internal processes and systems for selecting suppliers (including due-diligence procedures) and managing quality that have been built and refined over the last seven years.
• We have seen almost every QC problem in the book and have built processes and contingency plans for those.
• This helps you reduce the return rates on their products, which is a significant cost for any business.
• Reduced returns also reduce indirect business costs such as customer service costs.

Shipment Consolidation Savings

• When you are buying products from several suppliers in the same region, we can help reduce logistics costs by consolidating these shipments into one.
• This can also help with better “cash flow” as it enables you to place smaller orders with suppliers, while still being able to get the lowest possible logistics costs.

Sample Consolidation Savings:

• When you are constantly working on new samples, the courier costs can add-up.
• We act as a local office for you, consolidating all the small shipments and shipping these out as a single consolidated shipment to cut down on courier costs.
• Even before we send you samples, your account manager would test these to ensure they meet your standards.
• Often they will discard samples that don’t meet requirements, which means many of the samples don’t need to be sent to you at all, saving both courier costs and time.

Payment consolidation savings:

• You are able to send one large payment to us which can then pay all your suppliers so you do not need to make multiple international transfers.

Improved sales due to better “Speed to Market” for new products:

• “Speed to Market” is a critical factor when it comes to launching new products as it gives you the first mover advantage.
• Outsourcing the sourcing and QC functions to us enables you to launch products faster than your competition as our processes are primarily built for sourcing and QC – even for brand new products that have never been on Western markets.

Increased ROI on your Time:

• Outsourcing your sourcing and QC enables you to focus on your core-capabilities whichoffersa better ROI on your time.
• If you excel at analyzing data and spotting new product opportunities would you really want to spend your time chatting with a supplier on Skype at2AMtrying to explain yourself in different ways due to the language barriers?
• Every time you work with a new factory to source a new product it can take a few orders and several months for the factory to adapt to your working style and your internal processes.
• After a couple projects with us, your Account Manager knows yourstyle,and can communicate this with suppliers.
• This means you do not have to build relationships from scratch with each new supplier.
• Also being on the ground in China and speaking the local language significantly accelerates that relationship-building process.

Improved sales due to better reviews:

• A high return rate can ultimately kill a brand even before it takes off.
• Product reviews are critical in driving product sales.
• When you have fewer QC issues and a consistent product over repeated runs, this naturally leads to avoidance of negative reviews and more positive reviews, which ultimately results in increased sales.

New product development or customizations to existing products:

• We do a lot of work developing new products across industries.
• Consequently, we often the technical resources that make product customizations as well as new product developments possible.
• This can often be challenging, as factories in China are great at mass-producing but not so much at problem-solving and innovation.
• This also enables you to create new products in China and enjoy increased margins for extended periods of time due to patent and/or tooling ownership.

Avoiding expensive lawsuits or confiscation of goods by authorities like Customs:

• We ensure compliance standards are implemented and proper documentation is made available if authorities like customs ask for it.
• This can be critical as not having compliant products or documentation to prove compliance can lead to seizure of goods which can really hurt a business.
• In the same way, as a business scales it becomes more susceptible to lawsuits and claims if a product harms the end-user.
• This can be avoided by ensuring major quality issues are avoided through good quality control processes and having the right documentation in place when one of these issues do come up.

We work to lower the costs for you. Ultimately, if we aren’t providing ROI for you, in terms of time and money spent importing, then we aren’t successful. We are confident that IMEX Sourcing Services ultimately saves you money throughout all the ways mentioned above.

Reach out to us or set-up a call with us to see how we can work together on future projects.