Welcome to the second half of our doing business in and with China Q and A session. Today we talk about the mistakes we made when we started importing goods from China. We both have examples of things catching us off guard while waiting for our shipments. The issues ranged from a high duty fee on an order, to a major cultural blindside, like Chinese New Year shuts down the whole country for a month!

We also discuss how we handled those time and money crunches that made us want to pull our hair out of our skulls. Sometimes the money just isn’t coming in fast enough and sometimes an international incident will delay your product. We offer advice on how to plan ahead, so you aren’t stuck with too little or too much inventory.

This half of the Q and A is all about the things that could (and often will) go wrong in your business. Tune in if you want to know what it is really like ordering and shipping products from China. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Here are some of the topics we discussed today:

• What mistakes did we make in the beginning?
• Our experiences with poor money management.
• How tax laws differ in America versus Canada.
• Why waiting for a shipment will almost always take longer, than you expect.
• Strategies that will make waiting on inventory shipments a little more tolerable.
• Dave’s “shot gun” approach to product launching.
• Mike’s “order more” approach to product launching.
• What to do when a product “dies.”
• Things we do differently now because we learned it the hard way.
• The weird business culture differences we didn’t expect.
• Our top 3 tips for anyone wanting to get started in shipping from China.

As a side note, keep in mind we are launching an Ecom Crew course around September. If you are interested in being part of that, then visit www.ecomcrew.com/course, if you sign-up we’ll let you know when the course is ready. The first few people to purchase the course will receive a 25% discount.

This episode is sponsored by Stamped.io. We have recently switched to Stamped.io, so we can get the most out of our reviews, and they have a really great product. We are proud to partner with them and there is a link below to check them out.

Resources Mentioned Today:

Amazon

Color It

Chineseimporting.com

Ecom Crew Course

Stamped.io

If you have any questions or anything you’d like us to discuss on the podcast you can now email us directly at ecomcrew.com!  Just send those emails to [email protected]. Also, we would really appreciate if you would leave us a review on iTunes. Thanks for listening!