Forty Business Cards, and the Four Questions Behind Them

A third of them photographed the card

Forty business cards over two days is not a large number, and we are not going to inflate it. What we did not expect was what buyers did with the card before they put it away.

They photographed it. Not one or two of them. About a third held the card up, took a picture with the phone, then put the card in a pocket and the phone back in their hand. One man at dusk asked us to hold it still while he got the focus right, and took three shots.

Think about where a card goes otherwise. Into a jacket pocket, then a suitcase, then a desk in Almaty or Lagos or Karachi, under three catalogues and a customs form. By the time the buyer needs a sourcing agent, the card is a rumour. The photograph is different: it sits in the camera roll next to the picture of the machine he actually liked, two thumbnails away from the chat he is about to open on the flight home.

The four questions, in the order they arrived

Two days of conversations came down to four questions. Almost every buyer asked at least three of them.

1. “What is the price for this quantity?” Usually with a phone held up: a photo of a machine, a competitor's catalogue page, sometimes a screenshot of an Alibaba listing. We did not give a number on the spot, and that is deliberate. A price without a specification is a number that will be wrong in three weeks. What we asked instead: material, tolerance or power rating, packing, order quantity, destination port. Five answers, and the quotation is real.

2. “How long does it really take?” Not the lead time on a website. The real one, in the month the buyer orders. This we could answer, because we sit in the factories and see the queue. If a line is running two shifts, a repeat order of a standard item can be 25 to 30 days. If the tooling is new, add three to four weeks and do not believe anyone who says otherwise.

3. “Will you go and check the factory?” Yes, and we describe what we can and cannot prove. Licence, production lines, quality process, capacity, who signs off before loading. We send our own photographs. We also tell the buyer which parts we could not verify, instead of filling the gap with confidence.

4. “How do you get paid, and what happens if it goes wrong?” Service fee as its own line on the quotation, never folded into the unit price. No commission from any factory. If the goods fail inspection, they do not ship, and we say in advance who pays for rework and who carries the delay.

These four are answered at length on our FAQ and customer Q&A page: “How do you charge?”, “How do you make sure of quality?”, “What is my real landed cost?” If your question is not there, the form at the bottom of that page reaches a person, not a mailbox.

Three things we will not promise

We will not promise the lowest price. Anybody can say it, and the sentence is worth nothing without the same specification, the same packing and the same payment terms. What we can do is put the factory price and our fee side by side so you can see what you are paying for.

We will not promise every supplier is a factory. Traders exist at every Chinese trade fair, and some of them are good at their job. What we do is label each one: factory, probable factory, trading company. The choice stays with you.

We will not promise a delivery date the factory has not confirmed in writing. If we do not have it, you will hear “not yet” rather than a comfortable guess.

What happens to the forty cards

They go into a list, and within a week each one gets one of three verdicts: has a budget and a date, has a budget and no date, has neither. The first group gets two or three factory options and a list of questions to put to them. The second group gets a short note on what would make the project start. The third group gets a polite reply and no follow-up, because pretending otherwise wastes their time and ours.

That is the less photogenic half of the job, and it is the half that decides whether a container ever leaves.