Why Aren’t There Seamless Product Sourcing Platforms?

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By Jacob Maslow

telephoneWouldn’t it be nice for a US company looking to sell a product in the local market to simply come up with a design, upload it to a website, and the products arrive from China a few weeks later ready to be sold in the United States? If this seems too good to be true, it is. If you want to do this, you have to actually go through many different steps, deal with many different people, and jump through many different hoops.
It would be nice to have one unified platform available online that handles custom manufacturing. This is very different from Alibaba where you look for products that have already been designed and manufactured. You just look for a product and then sell it in the United States. That’s very different.
We’re talking about something where you come up with an idea, send the design somewhere, and get Chinese manufacturers to bid on the design. You pick a winning manufacturer. They send you a prototype, and you approve it. After you approve the prototype, you send payment or a line of credit information and after a few weeks, you get your first cargo container of products.
You only need to break it into smaller parts and then sell it in the market. There’s no online platform like this. I think it would be a huge moneymaker because it’s a business-to-business platform. Moreover, there are so many bells and whistles you can put on this thing. You can put a multilevel marketing component or an online storefront component. There are so many ways you can add value to this model. Regardless, the whole idea of simply clicking a few icons, uploading a design, and then having a product come out of it would be tremendous.
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