Recommendations please

Hi I am going to be selling on Amazon and I have found that the North American and Canadian prices for products like flash drives are too high for my budget.

I have seen on the Internet that there are a number of Asian sites that sell products e.g. Ali Baba , DH gate and others.

What I would like to find out is how good and reliable are they and their products compared to US and Canadian products.

Also if I Ali Baba or others are okay are there any companies that are better than others or are there any that I should avoid ?.



Thanks for your help

 

You posted before asking for web sites to purchase Flash Drives in bulk. Did you take some time to explore Alibaba and find out what it is?

It's an international business trading web site. It connects businesses with suppliers. Similar to how Amazon can connect a business with a consumer. However, the major difference is Alibaba is NOT like Amazon with warehouses and shipping facilities. Alibaba only connects YOU with the SUPPLIER and provides a virtual transaction method through the web site. So is Alibaba reliable? Yes. Are 100% of all suppliers on Alibaba reliable? Probably not. Are all users on eBay reliable? Of course not. You can read reviews and research the company before you reach out to them. You will have good and bad experiences. However, if you are SIMPLY looking to buy a product in bulk it's a pretty simple transaction. Start with a smaller order to test out the product and service first. If happy continue to a larger order.

As far as the quality of the product purchased. That will vary. Ask for samples or example models. You need to be open minded though and realize 1) Sometimes products manufactured in China are actually manufactured the EXACT same way in America and 2) Sometimes products manufactured in China ARE NOT manufactured the EXACT same way in America. hehe...

Luckily for you a flash drive is NOT an expensive product or expensive to produce. The major brands hype up the price because they can. I am sure the build quality is similar. For what you are looking to do Alibaba is the way to go. I would however go with a supplier who will REBRAND the product with YOUR logo if you plan to sells/ship directly on Amazon. This will help you stand out.

Here's a quick story to share... There's a (crappy) watch company called MVMT that was purchased for hundreds of millions of dollars that got their start on Alibaba. They contacted suppliers of cheap watches in China and rebranded the product with their logo. They sold the public a story of bringing luxury watches to normal every day people on social media. The public bought the story and MVMT became successful. The watches are CHEAP crappy Chinese watches with Chinese quartz movements that can be bought for a dollar. However, despite being cheap pieces of crap the clueless public still saw value in the product and purchased it with a smile on their face. Anyway...it's a flash drive. Most people won't care about brand if you can get YOUR marketing right. They also won't notice the difference between the Chinese product or Sandisk (chinese???). In fact, there probably isn't much of a difference. Most likely you can find bits of the product produced at that Chinese sweatshop all over America and Canada in our quality products.. haha

 

Not sure what his business idea is but..................There's hundreds of flash drives available with HUGE storage capacities for close to nothing price on every single web site. And in 2019 there are better options including virtual "drive" services. I think the original poster should re-evaluate why he wants to buy Flash Drives in BULK. I can't see a huge resell market or even any sort of profit margin if you want to be competitive.

Another thing to keep in mind is that those manufacturers in China (and other countries) they aren't making flash drives just for your potential sale. They aren't making flash drives for just one other company. They are manufacturing these by the millions for businesses all over the globe who are sell all over the place from small stores to HUGE stores to amazon to ebay etc. Some of these companies are happy with making pennies as they will sell by the boat load.

 

1) SSD's are basically glorified flash drives. They ALL use some form of flash memory, and act as drives.

2) The solid state storage in phones, and the ONLY option for expanding it uses flash drives -- aka memory cards.

3) It's the preferred method of making install "disks" these days. A USB flash stick or cheap leftover SSD makes for blazing fast installation medium.

4) Many project micro's -- like the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard, CubieBoard, etc, etc, use flash drives as their only boot medium, typically but not always in the form factor of memory cards.

Hell, it's why I just grabbed a pair of 128gb microSD cards off Amazon, one as a boot disk for my Cubie, the other as expansion to my phone.

Even if we call them "memory cards" they are for all intents and purposes formatted as FAT32 and accessed as if they were drives, and they use flash memory. If there's any other definition for a "flash drive" I've never heard it.