With the increase in cheap exports from countries like China, more and more companies are interested in sourcing high quality products at the lowest possible prices from these manufacturing powerhouses – let’s face it, in many cases these companies have to look at imports in order to compete effectively in their space.

One of the major difficulties in trading with countries such as China is establishing the initial rapport with reputable and trustworthy partners that can manufacture and deliver products in line with specifications. The recent spate of product quality issues and product recalls underscores the need to partner with suppliers capable of manufacturing products to the high quality levels that consumers in the United States and other western countries demand.

This trade tip is brought to you courtest of trade leads from the Gifts & Novelties section of our Business to Business Marketplace.

International trade portals have been around since the birth of the world wide web. They serve to match buyers of goods and services with suppliers, often in different countries. Trade sites like alibaba and made in china have thrived as the concept of import-export has trickled down to smaller and smaller players on both the “supply” and “demand” sides of the equation. More recent entrants providing trade leads search services have concentrated on improving the user experience by adding functionality and improving the relevance of trade lead results. Business to Business marketplace sites like Fuzing.com have also endeavoured to vastly increase the speed at which they return these relevant trade leads.

So, when looking at the various portals, what is it that users should be looking for? We’ve put together a list of the most important factors.

• Search Functionality and Relevance - first and foremost, a good business to business marketplace will provide you with the tools necessary to find the trade leads for the products and services that you are looking for.  Most will provide you with a free-form search box that you can type your query into.  But the most important thing is that the resulting trade leads are what you expect them to be, and not just a jumble of disparate results.
• Categorization of “like” products – the best marketplaces will categorize their trade leads so that once you find something of interest you can see what category it belongs to, and then you can look at additional trade leads from the same category.
• Speed – another important factor is the speed of the site and the time it takes to return a relevant set of results.  There are a few sites around that boast millions and millions of product listings, but their search technology is sadly lacking as you spend literally minutes waiting for a single page of search results to be returned.
• Overall ease of use – the best business to business marketplaces offer a streamlined and intuitive interface that gets you quickly to the trade leads that you are interested in.