What 1688 is and why sellers use it
1688 is the largest wholesale marketplace in China, bringing together products and their suppliers in one place. You can find almost any product there for almost any task, whether you sell on marketplaces such as Wildberries, Ozon or Yandex Market, or through your own sales channels.
In short, you can place a wholesale order for anything from diapers to complex metalworking machines.
Why has the platform become so popular? It offers an extremely wide product range, and it takes supplier verification seriously. Platform staff visit suppliers, check their warehouses and assess production standards and product quality.
Below are three practical secrets for working with the site.
Secret 1: How to search on 1688
To start sourcing, go to the site and enter your product in the search bar.
The site has no English-language interface, so you need to search in English or Chinese. Both work. Here is how to do it in Chinese:
- Open Google Translate and enter the product you want, for example a computer mouse.
- Set the target language to Simplified Chinese and translate.
- Copy the resulting characters, paste them into the 1688 search bar and run the search.
- Review the product results.
A quick example of the margin. A mouse like the ones in these results retails for about $8, while the wholesale price is around $2. That is roughly a $6 markup before logistics and other costs. Cheaper wholesale options can push your margin even higher.
Secret 2: Pay attention to the supplier
Most mistakes made by new sellers come from choosing the wrong supplier. Some chase the lowest price and pick a supplier with an unverified account. Others choose a supplier and only later discover that the supplier does not accept returns of defective goods, and so on.
Every supplier card on 1688 contains many fields, each carrying useful information:
- supplier rating
- number of reviews for the product you are looking at
- average rating of that product
- supplier company name
- minimum and maximum order quantity
- and more
By analysing these indicators you can choose the supplier that best fits your criteria. Reviews and average ratings are obvious and you will check them anyway. Two other fields deserve special attention:
- the Bull badge
- the number of years on the platform
The Bull badge
The Bull badge means the seller has traded on 1688 for a long time, has high sales, little or no defect rate and a good reputation, and has submitted incorporation documents and passed verification.
In other words, this badge signals that the supplier can be trusted and that their goods deserve more confidence than those of suppliers without it. It is a kind of quality mark on 1688.
Years on the platform
This is how long the supplier has been selling on 1688. Aim for at least 3 to 4 years, and more is better.
The longer a supplier has traded on the platform, the more trust they potentially deserve. If they have not slipped up or been caught in fraud or deception over several years, they generally deserve a bit more confidence.
This indicator is indirect, but it gives you extra protection when choosing a supplier.
Secret 3: Test first
You have chosen the product and analysed the seller. Now it is time to buy.
A common mistake among new sellers is to order a large batch immediately, spending up to 90% of their budget on the first purchase.
Why is that a mistake? Chinese suppliers can send low-quality goods with a high share of defects. The problem is that you cannot fully protect yourself from this in advance. Any supplier may have some defect rate: 0.1% for one and 1% for another. You cannot predict it beforehand.
The best strategy is to buy small trial batches from several different suppliers and then gradually increase order sizes if the quality matches the price and your customers are happy with the product.
How to scale purchases
A sensible approach is to make the first purchase as small as possible: ideally 5 to 10 units of each product from different suppliers. This lets you handle the product, see how it performs and identify its strengths and weaknesses.
By the second purchase you will roughly know your supplier, so you can order up to about $1,700. A batch of this size lets you track the defect rate more accurately and decide whether such a level is acceptable. Can you build it into your unit economics, or would it make the product unprofitable?
On the third and fourth purchases you can increase volumes in steps of roughly $3,300 to $5,000.
From the fifth purchase onward you can relax a little and order larger amounts. Over five purchases you would already have spotted serious problems, and if something were wrong you would have stopped buying from that supplier. If you have completed four purchases with no issues, you can trust that supplier with larger sums and bigger budgets.
