China Wholesale Marketplaces You Should Know

As the world’s biggest manufacturing base, China leads the world in wholesale business and some China wholesale marketplaces stand out with their special charm. Here I would like to introduce some of the most famous China wholesale websites one by one. If you happen to be interested in sourcing bulk items from China, read on to find if there’s something helpful for you.

Alibaba.com

Founded in 1999 by Jack Ma and a group of intelligent Chinese young men, Alibaba Group is now the world’s biggest wholesale website with 47 million registered users from more than 240 countries and regions. It provides a series of online business management software and Internet infrastructure services to satisfy the growing needs of different sizes of online cross-border trades. Also, it has developed a payment system called Alipay, which is now commonly used in China and in some other countries.

The Alibaba Group now owns four online wholesale marketplaces:

• www.alibaba.com, for global big importers and exporters, charging membership fees and providing information services.
• www.aliexpress.com, newly founded in September 2009, an imitation of DHgate.com;
• www.1688.com, established in March 2010 for wholesale trade in China’s domestic market.
• www.alibaba.co.jp, an associated company of Alibaba Group, is mainly used for facilitating trade to and from Japan. For more information,  visit www.alibaba.com or www.aliexpress.com.

Lightinthebox.com

Also located in Beijing, Lightinthebox was founded in 2006 by Qiji Guo, the former CSO (Chief Strategy Officer) of Google China. It features a business model quite significantly different from DHgate by selling items to its global buyers rather than facilitating its suppliers to sell items. By doing so, Lightinthebox is able to control the quality and stock of each item. That’s partially why complaints about Lightinthebox on the wholesale forums or communities are comparatively much less. Now their customers come from over 170 countries and the number is still quickly growing.

Integrating both B2B and B2C, the retail and wholesale marketplace is recognized as a super star in the China wholesale marketplaces field by its fast-growing sales volumes and reputation. It has established stable and long-term cooperation relationships with more and more premium China-based suppliers and striving hard to improve its service to customers.

Currently there are 14 major categories of wholesale items available on Lightinthebox.com, among which fashion stuff are the biggest category. Both resellers and consumers like to shop fashion items like dresses (mostly evening dresses, prom dresses, and wedding dresses), handbags, shoes, fashion electronics, cell phones, etc there. No minimum order quantity is required and most items are offered with a 50% off shipping cost. For more information, read Lightinthebox Reviews or visit www.lightinthebox.com.

Milanoo.com

Compared with some veteran China wholesale websites like Lightinthebox, Milanoo is still quite a young e-commerce company. But it has its own distinctive features. The Sichuan-based wholesale store seems to be a developmental project having much support from the Sichuan Province government. Reports about Sichuan Province government officials pay visit to Milanoo.com show up on China’s influential newspapers and the internet occasionally. Though new to the world’s wholesale market, Milanoo grows rapidly both in its item quantity and service quality.

So far, wedding dresses and various other fashionable dresses as well as cosplay costumes are still the major revenue generators of Milanoo.com, as we can see from the vast array of such items. Featuring super-low prices and free shipping service, Milanoo’s wedding dresses are sold very well in the international market. Its pricing advantage is unbeatable. We tend to suppose that this is the short-term marketing strategy Milanoo adopts to increase its client number. But we don’t know whether Milanoo will continue its low price policy or change it in the near future. For those who are interested in shopping this wholesale website, we would suggest you always check out their Daily Madness Deals section accessible in the middle navigation bar of its homepage. There you are able to find the for-1-day-only low priced deals on a variety of items including wedding dresses, ball gowns, handbags, cosplay costumes, shoes, sexy lingerie, etc. The prices offered in that zone are significantly lower than their regular prices and they will turn to be the original regular prices after the day ends. So if you see anything you want there, grab the deal ASAP before it’s gone. For more information, read Milanoo Reviews or visit www.milanoo.com.

Chinavasion.com

Established in 2006, Chinavasion is the first wholesale website to offer drop shipping service to global buyers. And unlike the above mentioned China wholesale marketplaces, Chinavasion only focuses on selling all kinds of consumer electronics, gadgets, PC accessories, etc. Located in Shenzhen, Chinavasion is able to get the best quality and lowest priced electronics and gadgets from the factories in China’s largest manufacturing area for such items so both quality and prices are highly guaranteed.

On Chinavasion, every item is shown with detailed and clear description and can be ordered by 1 piece only. Of course, as your order volume increases, you will get deeper and deeper discounts. Whether you are a consumer looking for an electronic or gadget for yourself, or an electronics reseller looking for electronics or gadgets for your customers, Chinavasion can be a good choice, especially if you need a Chinese wholesaler to dropship your orders of electronics or gadgets to your customers directly. For more information, read Chinavasion Reviews or visit www.chinavasion.com.

DHgate.com

As the world’s first transaction-based wholesale website, DHgate has been winning more and more applause from all over the world since its inception in 2004. It is all agreed that the innovative business model DHgate developed for wholesale trade is the most cost-effective solution to small and medium-sized businesses. The wholesale website does not charge any membership on its suppliers and buyers, but only charges a small sum of commission on each successful transaction (included in the item prices). By doing so, DHgate suppliers and buyers can reduce their cost to the minimum and do not have to take any risk of investing too much before getting any benefit.

Based in Beijing, DHgate was founded by an outstanding woman, Diane Wang, the previous CEO of Joyo.com, which had been acquired by Amazon.com a couple of years before she set up DHgate.com. DHgate now boasts over 400,000 Chinese suppliers and 2.1 million global buyers and facilitates thousands of online transactions each day. It has a responsive customer service team to handle any pre-sales or after-sales issue for its buyers and suppliers 7 days a week. Also, the wholesale marketplace has built cooperative relationships with some famous shipping carriers like UPS and some world class standard of payment service providers like PayPal. For more information, read DHgate Reviews or visit www.dhgate.com.

If you would like to learn more about China wholesale marketplaces, please keep yourself up-to-date with China Wholesale Reviews.

(Note: Some of the links in this post are my referral links. Read my disclosure policy here.)