Sourcing marketplaces like Alibaba are where most founders start, and they work — but the seller you are talking to is often a trading company rather than the factory, whatever the listing says. Establishing which one you have is the first job for anyone using a start-a-business app to get a physical product made.
That single distinction changes the price of every unit you will ever order.
- Get a specification ready first. A 3D model a factory can quote against, not photographs.
- Search the marketplaces broadly. Alibaba and its equivalents are the widest net available, and the right place to start.
- Establish whether each supplier is the factory. Ask questions only a factory could answer. Expect several to fail this.
- Get quotes from more than one country. Including your own — the gap is often smaller than expected.
- Treat every quote as an opening position. Negotiate, and watch which suppliers actually move.
- Order a sample before a batch. Judge the supplier on what arrives, not on what was promised.
Why is the supplier you are talking to often not the factory?
Trading companies list on the same marketplaces as manufacturers and present themselves the same way. In Draper's own sourcing, suppliers claiming to be factories frequently turned out to be intermediaries adding a markup on top of the real production cost, and the listing gave no indication either way.
This is not necessarily a problem you have to solve. A good agent earns their margin in coordination, quality control and translation, and for a first small order that can be worth paying for.
It is a problem you have to know about, because you cannot negotiate sensibly without knowing whether the person quoting you controls the price or is marking up somebody else's.
How do you tell a factory from a middleman?
Ask questions only a factory could answer. What machines run this product, how many lines, what is the staffing on them, what happens when a run fails quality control. A manufacturer answers immediately because they are describing their own floor. An intermediary goes away and comes back.
Ask for a video walkthrough of production rather than photographs. Images circulate freely between listings; a live walk through the line is much harder to borrow.
None of this needs to be adversarial. Framing it as due diligence you have to do is normal in this trade, and a real factory has no reason to mind.
Does the first quote mean anything?
The first quote is a starting point, not a price. How much that matters scales with the order: for a one-off sample or a small batch the difference is minor, but on a large order the gap between the opening quote and the negotiated one is the difference between a viable margin and no margin.
Founders coming from consumer markets tend to read a quoted number as fixed, because that is how buying works everywhere else in their life. In manufacturing it is an opening position, and treating it as final leaves money on the table every unit.
Negotiate on the whole package, not just the unit price. Payment terms, tooling costs, sample fees and shipping all move.
Is manufacturing overseas actually cheaper?
Not always on the opening quote. Sourcing t-shirts, Draper found a Chinese factory quoting similar numbers to local Australian manufacturers. The difference was not the starting price — it was that the Chinese factory was far more willing to negotiate, and the local quotes moved much less.
That is the opposite of what most founders expect, and it changes what the comparison is actually about. The advantage was flexibility, not the headline number.
It also means a local quote deserves a real look. Shorter shipping, easier communication, simpler returns and faster iteration all have value, and if the starting numbers are close, those advantages are not being paid for as heavily as assumed.
What should you have ready before you contact anyone?
A specification a factory can quote against, which usually means a 3D model rather than images. Photographs and renders describe intent; a 3D file describes dimensions, tolerances and materials. Turning up with pictures alone means the first exchange is spent establishing what you actually want made.
This is the practical reason the visualisation work comes first. A render sells the idea to a customer; a model specifies it to a factory, and they are different artefacts made for different audiences.
Have the brand settled too. Colours, materials and finish are all quoted items, and changing them later re-opens the quote.
What finding a manufacturer will not settle
A manufacturer settles whether the product can be made and at what unit cost. It says nothing about whether anyone will buy it, and a quote is not demand. Test the product with strangers before you commit to a production run.
This is the most expensive place to get the order of operations wrong. Tooling and minimum order quantities turn an untested assumption into inventory, and inventory is the hardest kind of mistake to reverse.
The sequence that protects you is the cheap one first: put the product on a page, buy a little traffic, and find out whether the interest is real before a factory starts cutting.
Related questions
Manufacturing sits at the end of a longer sequence. How to validate demand before you build covers the test that should come first, and how to design a brand for a new business idea covers the decisions a factory will end up quoting against.
