E-commerce

Sourcing from China: how do you find a good supplier for your bol products?

Lars Hurkmans·Co-founder·14 January 2026·Reading time 10 minutes

You find a good supplier in China by first determining in detail what you're looking for, and then searching on Alibaba and Made in China. Don't rely on the paid first page, look for the factory behind the shop instead of going through Alibaba chat, and judge a factory on its age: from five years onward it gets serious.

For these insights, we spoke on our podcast with Maarten from Silk Road Connection, a sourcing partner with whom we also recorded a complete knowledge base. Maarten lived in China for five and a half years and assesses factories for e-commerce sellers every day. Below we translate his experience into the questions you ask yourself before and while looking for a supplier.

What exactly is sourcing?

Sourcing is finding a supplier, a source, for the products you want to buy in. It's not an established English term either in this context, but the meaning is simple: you want to buy in something, that product is made by countless parties, and sourcing is figuring out who delivers good goods and who doesn't.

Maarten has been running Silk Road Connection since early 2020 together with a Chinese partner he's known since 2010. Their setup: an office in the Netherlands and an office in China, with their own people doing the sourcing there. Deliberately no extra agent in between, so those people adopt their way of thinking. By his own account, around 99 percent of their clients are now active in e-commerce, on bol, Amazon or their own shop. We've bundled which other skills belong here in what you need to be able to do to succeed on bol.

What do you do before you start searching in China?

First determine in detail what you're looking for, and why, before you contact even a single supplier. According to Maarten this is the most important step and, at the same time, the step most often skipped. Not "let's first see what's out there," but making sharp choices: dimensions, materials, functions, packaging, quantities, everything you can think of.

The reason is practical. If you pass on incomplete information, you get results back that match exactly what you specified, but not what you actually needed. You then notice yourself that you forgot something, and the whole process starts over. That costs you more time than the preparation would have taken.

Where do you search: Alibaba and Made in China?

On the two sites best suited for this: Alibaba, which almost everyone knows, and Made in China, which is smaller but also works well in English. Enter a search query that brings up your product as specifically as possible.

Don't get stuck on the first page. On bol you want to rank at the top because good signals are attached to that, but on Alibaba you can simply pay for a spot at the top. So the top listing isn't necessarily the best, and often not even the cheapest. That doesn't mean that party is bad, it just doesn't say much. Maarten therefore advises starting around page two. We've worked out how you then approach Alibaba itself, from contact to negotiation, in how to successfully buy in products via Alibaba.

Why do you look for the factory behind the shop, not through Alibaba chat?

Because you get more done working directly with the factory than through an intermediary on Alibaba. Silk Road Connection does use Alibaba, but as a mirror and information source: they look at what's listed and then search for which factory is behind an attractive shop, so they can approach that factory directly. They don't use Alibaba's chat function for this.

That mainly makes a difference in price. Whoever does the selling on Alibaba isn't doing it as a volunteer and wants to earn something too, so the more parties in between, the higher the costs. If you're working on a range of products instead of one product, the advantage is bigger: at a factory you can request the complete range, and that factory might already make six of the eight products you had in mind. Then negotiations and contact go more smoothly.

To determine which product from such a range stands a chance on bol, Silk Road links a client's wish to demand on bol, using market data such as ours, among other things, to see which niche on bol a supplier could fill. There's one exception to approaching directly: if you're dealing with very low order quantities, Alibaba as a source is fine, since it remains a huge marketplace of suppliers. And sometimes a factory itself refers you to a seller on Alibaba who handles sales for them.

How do you recognise a reliable factory?

Largely by the company's age. Maarten uses this as a rule of thumb, not a hard limit: a two-year-old factory drops out immediately for him, from five years onward it becomes a serious prospect, and once a company is in double digits, you can generally rely on it much more. The reasoning behind it is simple: whoever only delivers junk doesn't last twelve years, since you don't keep landing new orders forever with bad products.

Also pay attention to the order quantities that suit a given party. If you're dealing with smaller volumes, a trading company isn't a bad option; it's often much more flexible on the minimum order quantity than a large factory churning out tens of thousands of units a week. So an intermediary isn't by definition worse, it depends on what you need.

This is also where a sourcer with local people makes the difference. Chinese colleagues who read and write the language, according to Maarten, filter good from bad much faster: sometimes they can already tell from the name or a photo that a page isn't right. That gets you to the best few options faster. For the first results, Silk Road typically allows one to three days, partly because of the six-hour time difference, seven hours during Dutch winter time.

What are the biggest pain points when sourcing from China?

Three things come up most often: the MOQ, quality and time. The MOQ, the minimum order quantity, is the best-known bottleneck. Especially with a first order, many sellers want a small quantity while also wanting personal customisations at the same time. That combination is difficult: one customisation means the production line has to stop and be reset, and a factory can sit idle for two hours before the first unit comes off the line. Spread that over a hundred units, and the per-unit price gets high.

With quality, it's often not about a bad product, but about that last little step sellers can't get their own supplier to take. The third point is simply time: you bring in a specialist so you don't have to do it yourself and can focus on what you're good at. Anyone still new to this also often lacks the expertise to properly judge every step.

Sourcing, by the way, is only finding the supplier. We've worked out the purchasing process that follows, from quotes to monitoring production, step by step in buying in from China: how do you avoid a bad purchase.

How important are communication and reporting mistakes?

According to Maarten, communication is the single most important thing in the whole process. Keep explaining what's happening and why, and report mistakes immediately, the same day. Something regularly goes wrong in production, that's part of it. The difference is in when you hear about it.

That clashes with a cultural factor. In China, people would rather not report a mistake, since that's an unpleasant conversation and someone might get angry, so it gets postponed. Silk Road specifically trains its people to do the opposite: better to report today that something is going wrong than one day before production was supposed to be finished. As a client, you get far more value from that early message.

Why do culture, loss of face and trust matter so much?

Because a large part of the difficulty isn't in the language, but in the interpretation. A grammatically correct English sentence is sometimes read differently by a Chinese supplier than by a Dutch entrepreneur. Loss of face weighs heavily in China, both for individuals and for the country. Maarten points to the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a turning point: in the run-up to it, speaking English was widely encouraged, and since then, according to him, the number of people who speak English has grown significantly.

The dynamics have also shifted. Ten to fifteen years ago, as a Western buyer you had more control in the conversation; nowadays you have to adapt more to the supplier instead. That's because China has developed and professionalised, so the old stories about copied products now apply to an ever-smaller group. That's made things somewhat easier for a professional sourcer, but rather harder for an individual seller, since you show up at the table with a less solid story.

Trust and relationships weigh heavily. Maarten and his partner had already known each other since 2010 before they started working together. And if things get a bit difficult with a factory, the conversation changes completely the moment the owner joins in; position and age matter. How you get taken seriously in that first contact, with the right tone and without overstating yourself, is covered in how to get taken seriously by Chinese suppliers.

Is China still the best place to source from?

On price-to-quality, according to Maarten, it's still the frontrunner, though he honestly admits he isn't objective about that. Vietnam was supposed to become the big new player, something he says he already heard around 2005; almost twenty years later, that still hasn't happened. For simpler products and for clothing, you indeed no longer necessarily need to be in China, and there Vietnam and India are gaining ground, often cheaper but with more risk. For more complicated products, Maarten doesn't see China being knocked off its throne in the coming years.

The explanation lies in experience: China itself took about forty years to get where it is now, and that build-up takes time. Where no human labour is involved, glassware for example, the difference with a country like Spain is small. The old image of junk from China, according to Maarten, is thirty years out of date and no longer accurate; cheap, lower quality now tends to come from other low-wage countries instead.

So why do some sellers still choose a different country? Usually for logistics, time and money. China is about as far away as it gets, with transport easily taking a month and a half, while something from Turkey or the Middle East can arrive within a few days. So plan for longer lead times and start on time, since processes, according to Maarten, almost always take longer than you hope.

Can you agree exclusivity on a design?

Yes, you can, and that's one of the reasons the same factory produces for both private label sellers and well-known brands. The difference then often lies in the design. You can agree that a particular design is only sold to you, whether that's for the Netherlands, for Europe or worldwide.

Such a first exclusivity deal is usually temporary and tied to your purchase volume. An example Maarten gives: as a smaller party you might get six months of exclusivity, provided you buy an agreed number of units in that period; if you don't hit that, the factory is free to sell the design to anyone from the seventh month onward. Copying can never be fully prevented, but factories themselves are also wary of it, since they don't want someone else in China running off with your well-performing design. Within Europe there's more you can steer than outside it. We've explained the difference between these models and variants like white label and reselling in private label, white label and reselling on bol.

Should you have your own product developed?

For most bol sellers that's a step too far. Buying in blank products is by far the easiest: if a factory makes ten thousand and you want fifty, the counter just goes to ten thousand and fifty as long as nothing changes. Your own logo, at minimum on the box, is a relatively small step you can take early on. Just keep in mind that printing boxes is one design with often a higher MOQ; those boxes are cheap, so you can view the extra copies as stock for a next batch. Maarten advises making customisations on the packaging as much as possible and keeping the product itself close to what already exists.

Your own design, where the shape of your product truly becomes yours, is a serious step. Then in the Netherlands you need to deal with things like patents, and in China you need agreements in place so no one runs off with your design. If a product is built from multiple parts and moulds, you quickly end up with several factories plus a party that assembles everything, which complicates things further.

There's also a fundamental shift involved. When buying in existing products, you look at what the market asks for; when developing your own product, you're pushing something onto the market and need to validate beforehand whether there's demand for it. That's a different discipline, and for most e-commerce sellers, a step too far.

Summary: how you find a good supplier in China

In short: sourcing starts with your own preparation. The more sharply you know beforehand what you're looking for, the more targeted your search, and the better you can judge a factory.

Read more:

• What do you need to be able to do to succeed on bol?
• How do you successfully buy in products via Alibaba?
• Buying in from China: how do you avoid a bad purchase?
• How do you get taken seriously by Chinese suppliers?
• Private label, white label and reselling on bol