With the emergence of B2B platforms like Alibaba and e-sourcing, small and medium size enterprises (SME) get the impression that sourcing in a remote country is easy like buying on eBay. It is obvious that new technologies with Internet like Chat, social media, B2B platforms, have brought so many tools that can be mixed often to efficiently provide the needed
Why? Because e-commerce in China is becoming huge and keep increasing. Chinese e-tailing has generated 190 billion dollars in 2012 and e-tailing industry has increased by 120% since 2003, birth year of the most important local e-tailing platform, and also now in the world: Taobao, which means “finding a treasure” in Chinese. Taobao is owned by Alibaba group, the most
Even so Chinese businessmen are more aware of international rules and etiquette, in recent years, the cultural differences will still remain as a major barrier to successful business with Chinese during the next century at least. Many managers believe no specific attention is needed for doing business and negotiation, and actually the capability to understand and manage cultural relationship is
WeChat (Chinese: 微信, Pinyin : Weixin, literally means Micro Message) is a newly fashionable mobile app in China owned by Tencent Holdings, the Chinese company has the largest worldwide community through QQ and is the third largest internet company in the world. Launched in January 2011, WeChat has already gained over 300 million users in 2 years (the last 100
Everybody knows that Chinese are good at PingPong, but do you know they have another national sport? TRADING, Yes indeed. Sourcing a product, for most Chinese traders seems to be actually translated this way : “find & sell-with-substantial-margin”. In China, good factories are not easy to dig up, language barrier and culture differences are of course some of the reasons why.
How traders hide behind the “Manufacturer” title. Alibaba is the first source of customer for traders. They apply better marketing strategies than pure manufacturers, thus, they gain more visibily and fit more to European or North American business standards. Because of this, they appear more trustworthy to westerners. In many cases, traders pretend to be manufacturers. Indeed, there are cases