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I'm Greg Mercer; I'm the founder and CEO of Jungle Scout. I have personally been selling on Amazon since 2012. I'm super passionate about it and helping entrepreneurs just like you.
Back in the day, I used to use online market places, like Alibaba or global sources to find different factories, but the problem was it was tough to know the quality of these factories before you started sourcing from them. So there's plenty of supply out in those different market places, and you'd find all different types of factories, but it was just hard to know how quality the products were going to be.
Sure, they could send you a sample, and you would inspect the sample, but I mean really they're going to send you their best sample. What it comes down to is if they're able to create an entire production run of the product at that same quality standard, and as a lot of you guys know, more often than not, the answer to that is no, they're not able to. So, where I made my breakthrough was finding out about U.S. Trade Data.
Any time you import something into the U.S., you fill out a bunch of paperwork, this is commonly done by your freight forwarder, and it gets submitted to the U.S. government. Through this law, called the Freedom of Information Act, we can get access to that data and third parties, like Jungle Scout, have taken this data and made it easy to sort and search through. Now let me tell you about my top two ways I go about using this data.
My favorite way to use it is to find the top-rated product on Amazon. What I'm talking about here is just whoever gets the best reviews. I don't care how well it sells, or if it's the Amazon Best Seller, whatever else, whatever product receives the highest star rating on Amazon, and then I search through the trade data for that respective company.
Ninety percent of the time you're able to see what factory they're purchasing their goods from and importing into the U.S. Now this works for large companies. I was looking at backpacks the other day. There were companies like Patagonia, and North Face, and Osprey, and other big brands and the factories that they're using. And it also works for smaller companies or private label companies. Now I can use that factory since they've already proven to be good, as opposed to just sorting through these online market places.
My second favorite way to use the data is if you've already found a factory that you think you like, is to use this data to vet the factory. So you can see things like who their top customers are, and then, of course, you'd check the reviews for those products or see if they're good, nice name brands. And you can also get a better idea about their shipments into the U.S., how long they've been shipping in goods, you know, has it just been a few months, or has it been four, five, six years? Obviously the longer, the better and that makes them a little bit more legitimate, or less likely they would do anything shady or run off with your money.
I also see the frequency of the shipments. You know if there's like 100 shipments every month, it's unlikely that they're going to be willing to work with small businesses, but you know if there's a handful of shipments each month, that means that they'll probably likely to work with small businesses. And it shows you that they have consistent imports going into the U.S., which right away adds to their credibility.
So these are my favorite tips for finding the best factories. No longer do you have to contact all these different factories from all these different online market places, but instead you can find the proven best ones because you know these are getting good reviews on Amazon and contact them directly.
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