#678 - New Alibaba Sourcing Strategies for 2025

#678 - New Alibaba Sourcing Strategies for 2025 Bradley Sutton: Today, we talked to one of the leaders of Alibaba here in the U.S. and he's going to talk about some cool new AI features you probably didn't know they had as well as a way on how you can even be an Alibaba supplier here. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We've got somebody who works for a company that has helped serious sellers for quite some time. We've got Justin from Alibaba here. How's it going? Justin Liu: Doing good. How are you, Bradley? Bradley Sutton: I'm doing just delightful. Now, since it's your first time on the show, always try and get a little bit of a backstory. Justin Liu: Where were you born and raised? Born in China and raised up in China. Bradley Sutton: Whereabouts? Justin Liu: North part of China, close to Beijing, Hebei province. Shout out to any of my friends. Bradley Sutton: My daughter in a couple of weeks is moving to the southern, the complete opposite, going to Hainan. She's going to be moving to, yeah, she speaks Chinese and she wants to kind of immerse herself a little bit. So we've been over there with a friend. Did you go to university there? Justin Liu: Yeah, I did. I did go to university in China, but I got my MBA from Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Bradley Sutton: Oh, yes. The basketball team has been quite bad the last, you know, like 20 years or 10 years or so, but maybe they'll have a resurgence here coming up. Justin Liu: Who knows? Who knows? Yeah, it's got its highlight peak at some point in time. Bradley Sutton: And then when you graduated from there, what did you start doing? Justin Liu: I started working for Amazon between 2015 and 2020. What did you do there? I took multiple roles, the retail leadership development program. I don't know how familiar the listeners are to that program. Basically, they They bring people in mostly MBA graduates and they put you on like third party business manager, retail vendor management, vendor managers. It's just a retail program to put you on different functions with the goal that at the end of the day, they're cultivating people or talents, candidates for category leaders. That's basically what I went through while I worked there for roughly about six years. The senior category merchant manager, I managed a third party business for sports and outdoors category for a while. And then I was the, you know, I managed the retail business, the vendor management business for, for, you know, tools category, hand tools, power tools. So, you know, we're dealing with top vendors, you know, in that world, you know, how fun that is. Before I left, I was, you know, a category head for home improvement. So, yeah. Bradley Sutton: That's good. Like, you know, You come from a background where you dealt a lot with sellers and understand now who you're servicing in a different way. Speaking of that, how long have you been at Alibaba and what is your position now? Justin Liu: I've been with Alibaba roughly about two years now. Currently, my role, I'm the country general manager for Alibaba.com in North America. I oversee the Alibaba.com business for For U.S. and Canada, obviously mostly U.S. So my team is responsible for continuous work with them and developing new features and programs to help them to source more and source more conveniently. Also, my team is responsible for working with U.S.-based, North America-based suppliers, wholesalers, help them to open up storefronts, list their products, brands, wide label or emerging brands, whatever that is, we help them to. You know, list their products and selection on our platform so you know they can have access to retailers and distributors were interested in sourcing their products. Yeah. Bradley Sutton: Let me just talk about that for a second because I think that's different than what people think about Alibaba. Of course, Alibaba is known for sourcing, the leader in the world in sourcing, but then they're like, wait a minute, I might be a manufacturer of my products here in North America or I might have my own line of products And you mean I could be a supplier on Alibaba? Can you talk about that program a little bit? Because I would venture to say that probably 95%, if not more, of our audience might not even know that's a thing. Justin Liu: Yeah. Yeah, I'd love to talk about it and provide a little bit more background and how we think about it and why this became one of the most important strategies for Alibaba.com in the North American area. I'll share with you some high level numbers. Roughly about 60% of the buyers on Alibaba.com are online slash offline retailers and resellers. These are people that are looking for people to buy and then resell, be it white label or light customization. Obviously, Alibaba.com is known for You know customizable products creating your own brands, but more you know a lot of these people are also looking for you know just some Some sourcing opportunities where there is enough of a margin that they buy low and then resell high and pocket some profit out of it, especially when the creating your own brand world is getting more and more competitive and capital heavy or intense, if that makes sense. If you want to start your brand or Or, you know, your product line on Amazon, you know, more often than not, you have to be ready for, you know, some serious investment operation. And that's why, you know, platforms like Helium 10 is, you know, extremely valuable to the wannabes who are people that, you know, want to. You know, experience that or grow their business on Amazon. It is not an easy or sort of like a blue ocean market anymore. By no means it is right. You know, when I joined Amazon back, you know, in 2015, You can still just go and create our own brand and really focus your own product addressing some sort of, you know, unmet concerns or needs in the market and still make a pretty good money out of it. But not today, right? You have to be somewhat like a professional seller, right? You got to know what you're doing. You got to continuously optimize your supply chain, marketing, You know, ACOS and everything. It's a holistic, it's a business, right? It's not a hobby anymore. So we do have a lot of retailers and buyers that are interested in buying and reselling and are not ready to create their own brand per se, that kind of heavy investment. They're just looking for products they can buy in bulk. At a discount and resell at maybe 20-30% margin and make a profit out of it. That's the largest profile or persona of the buyers that we have on Alibaba.com today. And that means there is a huge demand, a hunger for products that you can resell, buy with a price advantage and then resell. So, you know, on the other hand, on the flip side of the coin, for sellers on Alibaba.com, right? Historically, yes, there are a lot of Manufacturers factories that are doing OEM like customization, but we're seeing an increasingly amount of people that are just offering ready to ship selection is already made is why label or maybe got his own factory name printed on it. People don't really care about it. You know, if they're just reselling on Shopify, eBay, Amazon, you know, some some some random e-commerce in their own storefronts. Obviously, there is a process you got to pick. You know what, what you like, you got to pick the best, you know, Bluetooth headphone out of 100 or 200 Bluetooth headphones on Alibaba.com. You got to be the one that pick the right product for your audience, or for your buyers. But it doesn't mean as a buyer on Alibaba.com, you have to customize it, you have to invest and buy 5000 units to start your business, you can just buy 20 units. If the if the cost if the price is right, there is a profit. So for sellers, especially wholesalers that I'm talking about, right, in the U.S. that are based in the U.S. have inventory sitting in their U.S. warehouse and looking for serious business buyers. They're not just buying one unit, two unit that are, you know, trying to buy in bulk 50 units, maybe four or $500 order value. We have a lot of those buyers. And historically speaking for wholesalers that are trying to distribute to a community or a pool, a group of more serious business buyers, they got to rely on their own network. They got to rely on sales team or they have to go to some kind of trade shows. And if they go to a trade show, you know how expensive that could end up being, right? So if you open up a store on Alibaba.com, list your brand, list your products properly, you know, clean it up. Present your store. It's like your own store. It's a virtual store, but it's like your own wholesale store. And we will send, you know, a serious business buyer to your store. There will be foot traffic, there will be, you know, negotiation, communication, because it's B2B. So people might ask you questions. How about, you know, what kind of discount do I get if I buy over 500 units? That's normal, right? That's what you do when you have a sales team and do business offline. We have all of those that facilitates, you know, our wholesalers to run a business just like how they're doing offline, except it's much economical. It's much affordable for them, you know, to acquire serious buyers through Alibaba.com versus more conventional like trade show or sales team way. Bradley Sutton: Yeah. I think this can go two different ways. On one hand, first of all, do I think, hey, start an Amazon business by sourcing this way from a domestic base? Probably not because the price is just going to be a lot higher for domestic and the odds that it's a very low competition is very low. However, TikTok Shop is a place where people are starting businesses now where it's kind of like wide open compared to Amazon. And I think it's very likely, like something starts trending on TikTok Shop, you don't want to wait to have to source it from China or from Pakistan or something like that. You might be able to find something to hit a trend from a local supplier. And is the margin going to be as much as it would be if you sourced it from Alibaba in China or something? Probably not. Price is not the issue. It's time. You know, yeah, you can get something, you know, based in California, like in three days and put it on TikTok shop right away where it would take like maybe two months. To get from China. So that's one interesting angle for this. But then the flip side, also, if I am interested in being like a supplier, or wholesaler, I guess, as you can say, or distributor, however you want to call it, and list on Alibaba, how do I do that? Like, where do I go to open that relationship with Alibaba? Justin Liu: Yeah, so it's it's it's super easy to become a you know supplier slash seller on audible.com You go to audible.com website and on the top right hand corner there's a button says become a supplier you click on that you leave your Email information, cell phone, register an Alibaba.com account. Our accounts are set up in a way that allows you to sell and buy at the same time within one account. So once you register an account, it enables you to buy immediately. But in order to sell, you have to sort of like upgrade it. And for those that are familiar with Alibaba.com, we do charge $1,999. Annual membership fee, all you need to do is just, you know, in your account, click, you know, I want to sell and then pay that fee with your credit card. Or if you want to learn more about it, you know, we have sales team that will reach out to you, provide you a demo and tutorials and stuff and explaining how to run a business. You know, you can do it after sort of, you know, You make your decision. The nice part of it is not only do we have sales team, we also have account managers based in the US. Once you register, what normally will happen is we will either create like a WhatsApp group or an email thread where you have access to two account managers, one from the US, one from the sales channel. On board of the user, you have someone that's answering your questions, you know, 24 seven. And then you also have someone from Alibaba worked for Alibaba employed by Alibaba to, you know, to do account health checks, you know, diagnosis and helps you understand how you what you should do list more products, run some advertisement, whatever that is to to drive your business. Yeah. Bradley Sutton: Cool. Cool. All right. So there's something new that maybe some of our community out there didn't know about. So thank you for that. Thinking about selling on TikTok Shop? Or maybe you are already in it and you're ready to scale. Unlock all of Helium 10's brand new TikTok Shop tools with our diamond plan. Everything from bulk Amazon to TikTok listing conversions to instant Amazon MCF fulfillment. Best of all, you use the code TT10 to get 10% off Diamond for six months, even if you've used a coupon before. So go ahead and upgrade and let Helium 10 do all the heavy lifting for you so you can focus on what really matters. For more info on our new TikTok shop offerings, visit h10.me forward slash TikTok. I'll see you there. Another topic I think that's hot here this year. And that's the T word of tariffs. And so people are, when they think about like, wait a minute, now, I should probably never consider Alibaba a factory from China or something, because the tariffs are just out of control. But there's actually ways that Alibaba can, you know, if you're sourcing with Alibaba, you can actually help reduce some of this tariff impact. So how is that possible? Justin Liu: Yeah, I mean, I, I don't want this to sound like, you know, we have the super bullet, we have the recipe that takes care of, of tariff. And, you know, I don't have an answer like that. Alibaba.com is here to help, obviously, you know, not because not because you know, we have this cool feature, we have this, this new program, because it doesn't work that way, right? You know, a tariff is a tariff, someone is swallowing that cost. But the most valuable thing on Alibaba.com today is, again, our sellers, our 3P sellers. Just like how the 3P sellers are creating value, delivering better experiences to Amazon or Walmart buyers, Alibaba.com suppliers from different parts of the world are creating value to our buyers, which is the sourcers. The brand owners, we have a total of 200,000 suppliers that are actively selling on Alibaba.com today. And remember that each every single one of them probably paid somewhere around $2,000 a year. So they're taking this seriously. It is not some sort of like, you know, zombie accounts that someone created and never Never check it. These are active business owners who paid money to open up a store and present their selection to buyers worldwide. And this 200,000 suppliers, I know a lot of you think, oh, the majority of them are from China. Yes, the majority of them do are from China because China is the factory of the world. You know, in most of the categories that are top selling on Amazon or TikTok today, There is probably a lot of factories that are capable of manufacturing at low cost and great quality from China, but we also have suppliers from all over the world, from Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Thailand. We have hundreds of sales team and business development team based in those countries that are knocking doors of different factories and trying to bring those selection to Alibaba.com. And we have sellers from Europe, we have sellers from Italy, France, we have sellers from US and that's what my team is doing. We have sellers from Mexico, we have sellers from Middle East, everywhere. We have hundreds, again, hundreds of people based in Europe that are working with different trade organizations, trying to bring the best of the best suppliers and manufacturers in different regions that really represents the quality, right? And the reputation of a lot of oftentimes of that country, right to Alibaba.com. So our buyers have access to them. And, and that's the most valuable thing that Alibaba.com provides to our buyers to mitigate the risk of, you know, tariff, the trade frictions, whatever that is. You have the largest pool and community of high quality suppliers that are creative, that are just like you, entrepreneurs. They want to grow their business. They're flexible. They will figure out ways to make this business continue to run and not be impacted by tariff. That's the most important value that we could offer to buyers today. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, so things are hopefully going to get more stable. When it comes to that, but things just in general, regardless of tariffs or anything else that's out there, I think something that especially newer sellers are concerned about within, it could even be experienced sellers, is A lot of times we are dealing with suppliers, companies, trading companies, whatever, factories that maybe we have never met in person. They're from a country that we are not in. If I buy from an American company here, there's certain things like laws and stuff where I can It doesn't save me from getting ripped off, but I know it's a little bit less likely due to the laws that exist in this country. But then now, all of a sudden, we're talking about, hey, I'm going overseas to China or somewhere else to negotiate a deal and perhaps send thousands of dollars before I see a product. So that's something, in my opinion, always Alibaba has helped with the trade assurance program and things like that, but what are some things like the trade assurance, you can talk about that, like some people might not know about that, that can help set a seller's minds a little bit at ease where it's not just you're blindly sending thousands of dollars and you're never going to see it again? Justin Liu: Yeah, I think you're right, right on the point. And you know, sellers at different stages, right? Their appetite for risk management or handling risks are a lot different. Someone who just opened up their TikTok store and trying to catch the trend versus someone who's been selling on Amazon for five years. We're talking about totally two different mindsets. And what I was just talking about is really, I think it applies more to the professional sellers that are more experienced than knows, you know, what they're doing a more sophisticated and forward looking and thinking and planning about their supply chain optimization diversification. But yet there is a huge community of people that just starting their their voyage, right? They're just starting they're just starting their e commerce journey. Alibaba.com is here to help again, we have launched our US local stock to our buyers. We started, you know, really heavily heavily investing in working with us based on especially those that have Inventory sitting in a US warehouse in LA or Atlanta or Jersey somewhere that's, you know, close by to our buyer community. We started working with them a couple of months ago and we're so lucky that we have accumulated a pretty active, you know, community of suppliers and sellers based in the US with hundreds of thousands of products that are available to US buyers. That will be shipped out in 48 business hours and arrive at your factory or your warehouse within seven business days. Right now in total, we have roughly about 300,000 products. And our goal by the end of this year is to grow that number to 2 million. And it will be like I was saying, these are products that are, again, selling in bulk mostly. So there is MOQ, average order value, we're talking about three, 400 bucks. You know, it's obvious it's going to be higher than TiMu, higher than TikTok Shop, but it's still pretty manageable for someone just starting, right? So What I think what this allows our buyers to do is really, you know, to, to act quickly and pivot, you know, you know, just give an example, you know, you see something that, you know, become sort of catch the trend on on TikTok shop, you know, or, you know, on just on TikTok platform in general, and you want to you want to try it out and sell it, you know, by yourself, you should come to Alibaba.com and check out our selection with a tag that says local stock. It says local stock on the product, right on the bottom of the product image. That means it will be shipped out in 48 business hours and arrive in seven business days. Buy it, list it on TikTok shop and sell it for maybe one or two weeks and see how that goes. You know, it won't be the end of the day if it doesn't sell. I mean, you probably lose 200-300 bucks. You know, you can start and try out some new SKUs, some new products, right? Because selling on TikTok is just about testing and constantly testing and testing and testing and see which ones will fly, right? So the speed of, you know, you're able to pivot is critical to running a successful business on TikTok Shop. And once you find that product, right, and you're, you know, starting to get the strong momentum of sales, you might be thinking, hey, how do I lower the cost by 10% and 15%? Should I start talking with the manufacturer directly and get rid of the middleman? Bradley Sutton: Cool. Now, something I know absolutely nothing about. A lot of the stuff you've talked about, I have an inkling of knowledge about local suppliers. The wholesale thing was a little bit new to me, that concept. I have heard rumblings of things like that, but somebody mentioned that you guys have this AI-based tool. That actually helps with either sourcing and or even like product discovery. And I don't think it's on your regular website because I don't see anything or I mean, at least I don't see like something in the search bar that's different. So what exactly is this and how can it help sellers? Justin Liu: Yeah, so we we launched the world's first AI supported sourcing platform is called Axial, A-C-C-I-O. You can look it up. It's a separate website. But we are stay tuned. We are integrating some of the Axial capability to our Alibaba.com main website. And if you know, check it out if you haven't used it before. It is very powerful. Due to a couple of reasons, different reasons, okay. So anybody for anybody that have dealt with, you know, working with a supplier from a foreign country, with a 15 hour time difference, and a bunch of factories, you barely can tell the difference of this manufacturers, who's better, who's worse, like, who's the one I want? Right. And there's always a price range. What about the material? What about the quality? What about the weight, the dimensions, everything? Because creating your own brand and identifying the trusted supplier is the key. I think it's one of the probably the most important supporting pillars to a successful brand. But still, it is a lot of work. Because it's manual work. Without AI, you are the one that's sitting in front of your laptop, going through this pile of information and trying to get some clue out of it. But with AI, with large language model, with machine learning, it's a lot easier because AI will read through all those data. We have data that we're putting on the detail page. We also have data in our database that we're not putting there because people don't normally read it or don't normally care about it. We're not expecting our audience or our users to click on a factory and read through 10 pages. Right, the history of the factory, trying to figure out now I learned something about this factory. It doesn't work like that. But with AI, it will compile all those information and make the reasonable and logical choice for you. Maybe not make the choice for you, but at least compile the information and digest the information and present it to you in a way that you can easily process. Bradley Sutton: ACCIO.com does all that, but basically it's reading everything that you would normally see on Alibaba, but then you've got the Gen AI interface where you can talk back and forth. Instead of just typing in a search term like you would on Alibaba.com, there was a product I was looking to source on Alibaba a couple of nights ago for one of the public brands that we have here at Helium 10. It's a chicken poop scooper. And so I literally typed that into Alibaba or actually first I did it in the Helium 10 Chrome extension on Amazon when I found the opportunity to use the Alibaba supplier finder that's in our Chrome extension. But then I went to Alibaba, but then now I typed in, hey, I'm looking for a chicken poop scooper that has a 10 inch base and is made of plastic and stuff like that. I wouldn't have searched or I wouldn't have used that kind of like, you know, language or search, you know, in the search bar because I knew it would probably give me gibberish, you know, like it's too much to overload a search bar in Alibaba. But sure enough, like I put it into this Axio.com and it started like, you know, spewing out results. And then, yeah, it looks like I can just click into it and then, you know, it'll take me to the Alibaba listing. So how long has this been around? Justin Liu: About a couple of months now, a couple of months. It's got millions of users, people, you know, starting to get the momentum, getting the trend. We're constantly, you know, sort of, the platform is constantly evolving very quickly, a lot faster than the Alibaba.com website itself, because, you know, Alibaba.com has been there for a long time. So we do want to sort of You know, maintain, you know, how it works in general, you know, not not changing too quickly. But with Axial, it does offer us the capability of adapting very quickly, you know, in response to the feedback from from our users. So you you're, you're right about it, it is conversational, it is just like using ChatGPT or any kind of like AI conversation kind of, you know, inter interface, you can ask questions. You don't need to, you know, normally in a search and browse situation, there are features, there are keywords you have to hit on in order to find the right thing, but you can just describe it to Axial. Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Justin Liu: You can understand. And you can tell him, hey, find me all of those products that are under, you know, $100 with MOQ lower than five. That's just what I want. It will process all the information and present to you. You know, a smaller group, but you know, meets your needs where you're looking for a little better. So it is conversational, it is, it is easier. And another thing that's about Axial is Yes, Axial relies on, you know, the digitalized selection and supplier data and information from Alibaba.com. It also includes a B2B wholesale selection from other websites and platforms. So you can pretty much think of it as a just a search engine for B2B selection. Not just limited to to Alibaba.com. Yes, Alibaba has a lot of stuff. But there are other platforms that are, you know, focused on different verticals, right? And Agskill have pretty wide coverage in that regard. And it is actually capable of, you know, compiling selection from Alibaba and from someone that's outside of Alibaba and be able to do the comparison and everything for you. Yeah. Bradley Sutton: I even did a search with an image and was able to read the image and pull it up. So guys, if you want a new way of sourcing and finding products and ideas, go to accio.com. It's pretty fun. I can already tell I'm going to I'm going to just be stuck on this for like two hours, just having fun, you know, searching for new. Justin Liu: Yeah, there's a lot of cool features that we're building. We're testing out and see, you know, what really entertains your users. You can ask Axio to generate a e-commerce, you know, report for you. Bradley Sutton: All right. Last question of the day is, you know, we've talked about some existing features, you know, like trade assurance Alibaba has had for a long time. We've talked about some other newer things that maybe some people might not be aware of. A lot of Helium 10 listeners out there today, one of the things we've mentioned or maybe something else we haven't mentioned, the number one Alibaba.com feature that you think most of our listeners maybe have not tried, something that's been underutilized that you would suggest people go out and try. Justin Liu: Well, that's a hard question. We have a lot of new features, but if you ask me to pick the best one, not the best one, but the one that people should really try it out, I would say Axial. Bradley Sutton: I was about to say, if there's something cooler than this, then man, that would be really cool. We should have talked about it more, but this is what I would have picked. Justin Liu: Yeah, it would be excellent because it's just so different. Try it out and compare it with how you normally source on Alibaba.com or some other platforms. It's totally different and like I was saying, it is explorative. It is also inspirational. So, you know, it's a it's a good place to kill some time and look for some ideas. We from from from from Alibaba.com own sort of feature perspective. Like I was saying, we will integrate Axial to our website very quick, very soon. So do stay tuned. It will be axial. I think we're going to call it, you know, something different, but right next to our search bar that, you know, where you type in and search stuff today, it will say axial search. So you can search with two different ways. Type out keywords or conversational. Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, before I go, I'm actually, like I said, I'm taking my daughter to I'm going to be going to Hainan in a few weeks and I'm on my way there. I'm going to spend a night in Hangzhou and so I want to visit the Alibaba headquarters for the first time and so I've been talking to some people over there trying to arrange that. Any local eateries around the Alibaba headquarters like, hey, this is an amazing restaurant or you got to go to this one place. If I'm only going to be there one day, where should I go in Hangzhou near Alibaba headquarters? Justin Liu: Man, this is the hardest question to get, I have to say. Hongjo, okay. Do you know much about Hongjo and Hainan? Bradley Sutton: Nothing, like my first time being, I mean, I've been to China numerous times. We have offices in Wuxi, Shanghai, Shenzhen, but I've never been to Hangzhou. Justin Liu: Yeah, so in China, we sort of, you know, a lot of Chinese people joke about Hangzhou. Hangzhou is, from my perspective, Hangzhou is like the Seattle of China. Bradley Sutton: Interesting. Justin Liu: Seattle has Amazon, Hangzhou has Alibaba. It's two cities. They're all nice cities, but they're getting a lot of attention and everything because of the e-commerce, the tech, the development, bringing people from other parts of the country. It attracts talents. That's what Hangzhou has been doing and Alibaba has been doing in Hangzhou per se. And Hanzhou really, as a city in China is known for its culture and history. So if you go to Hanzhou, you're going to check out the West Lake, right? There are a lot of history about that city. People, you know, that's what Hanzhou is known for. Not necessarily for its great food. I'm not a Hanzhouer. So, you know, Hanzhou people don't be offended. We joke about it. We say Hanzhou is a desert for, you know, delicious food. There's just no delicious food. But obviously, you know, that's a joke. Hanzhou is known for its history and culture and cultural relics. So there's a lot of stuff for you to experience. Now, this is probably one of the best time to go to Hanzhou. It could get a little bit hot and humid. But it's still nice. If you go later, there are a couple of months, Honduras rains a lot. That's another thing why I said it's like Seattle in China. You should definitely spare some time and go to the West Lake, check out the Leifeng Tower. There are a lot of cultural relics that are definitely worth a visit. Bradley Sutton: Thank you very much for the advice and let's see what's new next year, have you back on the podcast maybe 2026, see what's new with Alibaba and thank you for sharing all these updates with our audience. Justin Liu: Happy to. Thank you. Thank you, Bradley, for the invitation and I appreciate it. And have a wonderful trip to China. Bradley Sutton: Thank you.