Lessons

Lesson Info

Action - Send A Message To 5 Suppliers

in this video, we're going to send a message to those five suppliers. But before we do this, it's very important that we create an extra gmail account just for this purpose of messaging suppliers because as ERIC Rodney mentioned earlier once we're on the suppliers list, it's very hard to unsubscribe and it's much better to just create a dedicated email for this purpose. And then once we create that account, we're also going to need to make sure we have an alibaba account. Creating both accounts is free and it's also very simple. I'm gonna walk you through how to create these accounts. Now, if you've already created these accounts, feel free to skip ahead to three minutes and 30 seconds into this video and that's where we start messaging our suppliers. But if not, I'm gonna show you how to make those accounts right now. The 1st 1 is the gmail account and here we can just type in gmail to google Now, we want to click on the first one that comes up which is google dot com slash gmail from...

here, we want to click create account near the bottom and I'm going to fill it in with my name. And as ERIC Rodney mentioned earlier, a good idea is to do sourcing period your first name and then your last name and then that's at gmail dot com and I'll create a passport, add in your birthday, gender, current email address and click next step, we're going to agree to the privacy policy and that's it, we can continue to gmail and we have our gmail account. Now, as you can see, it's extremely easy. Now we want to create our alibaba account. I'm gonna open up a new tab and go to alibaba dot com. From here we want to click on my alibaba and at the bottom right we'll see join free. Now it's important when we sign up for ali baba account that we're using, that gmail that we just created which is sourcing dot eric Campbell at gmail dot com. And then they're gonna send a confirmation email. So we're just gonna want to go back to our gmail account and verify our email address and then we're gonna want to fill in the rest of the information for Alibaba account and for the company name you can just put your full name if you don't have a legally registered company and that's because you're doing business as a sole proprietor and then you're gonna want to enter your telephone number and that's it. You now have an Alibaba account. So I'm gonna click back to homepage and now we have our Gmail account, we have our Alibaba account and we're ready to start messaging our suppliers. We're gonna want to open two sheets. Now the first one is our supplier comparison sheet that we were using in the last video And the 2nd 1 is our alibaba message cheat sheet. As always you can find this in the resource pack it or download it as an attachment to this video and what we're looking for is templates under, asking for more product information. And we've included three different templates that you can use. So feel free to choose the one that you like the most. I'm gonna go with template three. And now that I know I'm gonna use that template, I'm gonna head over to our supplier comparison sheet and I want to open up these links that we saved earlier. So I'm just going to copy this. Go to our internet browser and paste that in and I'm gonna do this for all of our links here. Now that we have all of our suppliers queued up here. I'm gonna go back to our message cheat sheet and copy the template that we want to use, then I'm gonna start with the first supplier here. And I'm going to click on the contact supplier button from here, I'm gonna paste in the template that we were using and I'm just going to fill in the blanks here. So hello, my name is eric and I am with company name. We haven't officially spent any time coming up with a company name but for this purpose just use some name that you think would go well with your product. Don't worry if you put in a company name here, you're not committed to it. If you don't like that company name, you can change it later. But we just want to put something here to show the supplier that we're serious and we plan on creating a company around this product. For my example, I'm going to put pamper pet care and next up we're gonna put in the product name and I I'm gonna look up to make sure that the name I'm using matches the listing and they say double dog leash here. So I feel comfortable putting that in for the product name. And sometimes some of the formatting gets a little messed up. So we're just gonna have to correct those words and fill in the rest and for here since we're just asking for a general cost of ordering a sample, I'm not gonna put a full address and instead I'm just gonna say California, United States. That should be enough information to give us a good quote. And finally I'm gonna put my name down here, the company name and the rest of this. I'm just going to take out. I don't think we need it at this point. And that's it. Our message looks good to go. I'm gonna copy this so we can save time when we send a message to the next supplier. And then I'm gonna click on, send inquiry now and that's it. Once the supplier gives us a message back, we'll get a message in our Gmail account. One thing you always want to keep in mind when you're messaging overseas manufacturers is depending on where you're located, there could be a very big time difference. So it's important that the suppliers respond to our messages quickly. But we want to keep in mind that if we're sending a message in the middle of the night where they're from, we can't expect them to respond quickly because they're gonna be asleep. Instead. We have to be a little bit more patient or we have to stay up late at night. So we're talking to them during their daytime hours. Now I'm going to do the same process with our other suppliers. I'm going to click on contact supplier and I'm going to paste in that message we wrote earlier and I see the product name still has double dog leash in the title. So we're good with what we put in here. And I'm gonna click sending quarry now and let's do it with our three other suppliers for this one. How the listing setup is they only have an option to buy now. But we don't want to do that. Instead. We're going to click on this contact supplier button on the right hand side. We can do the same thing as before paste our message in. And again, I see double dog leash in the title. So we're good with that as the product name and I'll send inquiry. Now. Next up we'll contact the supplier. Hey center message for this one. I don't see double dog leash in the title. And so I'm gonna change the product name here and put double leash coupler and that way they know exactly what products I'm referring to. Double leash coupler, double leash coupler and then sending quarry now And finally our last one. And I'm just going to change the name to match what's up here, double dog leashes, double dog leashes and send inquiry now And that's it. All we have to do now is wait for some responses. After 24 hours I received messages from three of those five suppliers And this gives me about a 60% response rate. Normally you can expect to get around an 85% response rate. The reason why my response rate is lower is at the time of filming this, it's at the very end of the Chinese new year and not all the manufacturers are back in their offices yet. Now I'm going to head over to Gmail dot com and show you what these emails look like in your inbox. You'll get a notification with the message that was sent to you but we can't reply until we're logged into our account on alibaba dot com. For that reason I'm gonna open up alibaba dot com and here we can click on my alibaba and then sign into our account once you're signed in we can click on message center and from here we can see all of our messages we sent here are the first three where we got a response and you can tell because there's a button that says for you update. Whereas below that I have the two suppliers where I haven't received a response yet. What I'm gonna do at this point is send my message to some more manufacturers And the reason why is only three of the five responded. So already that only gives me three manufacturers to work with And after reading their messages, I see that one of them is not going to budge on their minimum order quantity of 1000 units. So at this point that only leaves me with two possible manufacturers and that's not enough for me. I would like to have a bigger range of selection and that's why I'm going to reach out to some more and to do that, I'm just gonna take a look at one of these messages and from here I'm gonna copy that template that already came up with and that way it'll make it a lot quicker when I message new manufacturers. So I'm gonna type in our products again and I'm gonna make sure gold supplier is checked. And then I'm gonna jump to the third page because I know I've already looked through the first two. Now I see an image that looks familiar, so I'm not sure if we already saved the supply or not. I'm gonna look at our supplier comparison sheet to see if I recognize this name and yep, that's already a supplier we've reached out to. So I'm gonna look for another one and after looking through these listings, I'm not seeing any more products that look like the one I'm after. So I'm gonna try changing the search term up here And maybe put two instead of double. After looking through for a little while I found three manufacturers that seemed to have an interesting double dog leash. Now I'm gonna contact the suppliers just like we did earlier and I'm gonna go back to our message center and grab this again paste that in double dog leash, double dog leash same product name. So I'll send it now. Then for the next one there's just a buy button. So I'm gonna try contacting the supplier, send inquiry. And lastly I'll send a message to the final supplier and that's it. We'll see how long it takes for these suppliers to respond almost instantly after sending those messages to three suppliers I got two responses back right away. But the only problem where both of them said that their minimum order quantity was 1000 units. And that means so far I've gotten three suppliers that all say they have a minimum order quantity of 1000 units and that's too high for me to consider doing business with them. But what I'm gonna do now is send them a message and see if they'd be willing to lower their M. O. Q. Or minimum order quantity. And to do that we're gonna want to open up our Alibaba message cheat sheet and we can skip through until we find the M. O. Q. Template under negotiating. And I'm gonna copy this. Then I'm gonna go to alibaba and from here click on my alibaba and then message center now I'm gonna view these updates and look for the products where they said their M. O. Q. Was 1000 units and paste this in and then change the wording and then fix some of this formatting. I'm just gonna change the wording here. So it makes more sense since we haven't talked about placing order yet. I said would you be able to And I'm just gonna put in 200 because I think that would be a good minimum order quantity and then thank you and add my name. Now I'm going to copy this so I can use this template for other manufacturers. Send Now go back to our message center and open up this one and this one the minimum order quantities 10 pieces. So we don't have to worry about that. Now I'm gonna check a few updates here and here are their minimum order quantities 1000. So I'm gonna send this message and then there's one other here that they sent a message saying their minimum order quantity was 1000 And I'm gonna see if they'd be willing to go to 200 for the minimum order quantity. So now that these messages have been sent it's time to wait and see what happens in this video. We sent a message to our five suppliers. In the next video, we're going to evaluate our supplier, offers pause this video now and don't move on until you sent a message to your five suppliers.