Doing business in China can be the best move that you company ever made and can put you ahead of your competitors faster than ever. Before you jump into it head first though, you should know some of the potential traps that are lying around the corner that you cannot see.

I have talked about how to find factories in many of my blogs before. This time I will tell you about some of the problems that exist after you have found one.

Pitfall #1- Quality Control is one of the biggest problems in China today. Many factories will show you a perfect sample of the product you want to buy but deliver a product that is totally different. As a solution they may offer you a discount on the order. Or they may telling you to ship it back to them and they will fix it. Either way you are going to lose time and money.

Now you have a credit with the factory and in order to use that credit the factory wants you to do another order with them. They assure you that all will be well. So you do another order thinking that they will get it right this time…no one is that stupid…right??? Wrong you are. They deliver another order of goods that are not up to spec. Now you have the same problem as the first time and they are offering the same solution.

Let’s hope that you are not stupid enough to do this again. In some cases depending on your contract you can get the money back instead of a credit and just move onto another factory. In other cases you will have to make a judgment call on whether to call it a loss and move on or go down the same road again. If you do have to go down the same road again, make sure that you do what you should have done on the first order. Do a pre-shipment inspection and verify the goods are what you ordered.

Pitfall #2- The product is good and up-to-spec, or so it seems on the surface. So you begin to sell it to your clients. Now all of a sudden you are getting calls from your clients telling you that they are having problems with the products and that they want an exchange or a refund on the product. All of a sudden your venture into China is not paying off like you thought it would.

So you call the factory and tell them the problem and they issue you a credit and tell you that it was one of their suppliers for a part inside the product was faulty, and they have a better supplier they will buy from next time. They then tell you to place another order and all the QC problems will be solved.

So that is what you do. After all, you need to get stock in ASAP you have returns coming in from all over the place and the longer you wait the more money it will cost you. Then the next order arrives to you and you inspect the product to make sure the problem was fixed. Happy you are and you begin to send out the products to all of your clients again.

Then all of a sudden it is like a reoccurring nightmare, you are getting calls from all over again about your products having failure rates. It turns out this time is something totally different that is going wrong with the product.

And so the cycle begins again. You call the factory and they tell you the same thing over. Only this time it is another supplier.

The moral of this story is that you should always make sure you do several inspections on each and every order you ever do with a factory. Only then will you be completely assured that you are getting what you ordered. I know that this sounds like a lot of work, but I never said doing business in China was easy. I have only said that it would be worth it….if you can handle the work load. My advice to you is to get a good agent that you can train to inspect your products in the exact same manner you do.