I Used Alibaba.com's AI Features to Find a Supplier in Under 10 Minutes

If you're wanting to start or scale an online store, the part that most store owners, most new store owners forget is the sourcing of the actual product. So let me show you how I'd find a supplier for something like a laptop stand without flying anywhere or chasing a middleman. We'll be showing you how to source this gist on Alibaba.com. I'll walk you through it as if you're sourcing a real product with me. So here's the way that I used to think that sourcing worked. You find a broker, the broker finds a factory and then there's two or three hands in the middle taking a cut. Quotes take a week. Minimum orders are huge and you're trusting people with your money that you've never met. You don't even know that they really exist. For a small store owner, this is a slow, it's pricey and it's risky. Alibaba.com works a lot better for new sellers. Alibaba.com gives us based business owners for things that are genuinely hard to get other places. So first off, they give direct access to verified manufacturers. Second, they give low minimum orders. You don't want to have to buy 500 if you're not sure if this is something that you're going to sell. I actually have a friend, I'll leave him unnamed, but he has a warehouse full of scissors because he found scissors he wanted to sell. He bought a whole bunch of them, but then one of his competitors undercut him and now he's stuck with scissors. So every time I go over to his place, I get free scissors, which that's a benefit, I guess. Low minimums, which Alibaba.com gives and three factory level pricing in us dollars in four buyer protection on every transaction. So that's what separates it from just Googling a random supplier. So this is Alibaba.com. First thing to notice up here is I'm set to deliver to the United States and prices are in dollars. So that's really nice. You want to make sure you don't accidentally source something from someone that only ships to China or only ships to Asia. But this will be nice because it'll show the prices that we see will actually be what it costs to source things here. We're going to look for aluminum laptop stand. So you can see right off the bat, it doesn't just do a search, a keyword search, but it uses AI to give a better search to find what you're actually looking for. But here is a provider that it recommends. That's a nice looking, I should probably get one of those. That looks really nice. And then here's a bunch of different aluminum laptop stands. So, but this is nice. I can click on a supplier and get a lot of information on the supplier itself. See the reviews for that particular supplier, what products they offer, how long they've been in the industry. You don't want somebody that's only been in the industry for three months. You might get a good deal, but it's not going to be very, you know, they haven't, they don't have a good track record yet, but this one, let's go ahead and filter by verified suppliers. So Alibaba.com runs these sellers through a third party check. So you can see it makes sure these companies are real before you even get messaged them or anything. So you can see even doing verified suppliers, there's like thousands of options here. That depth is actually the point because there's thousands of suppliers in a single category. So you're not stuck with just one factory's price. You can kind of do some competition. So let's do another filter here. Let's do a minimum order quantity of less than five. So that means if I want to test this out or sell this, I don't have to buy very many of them. So here you can buy two of these. You can buy five of these. This is good though, because I don't want to have to buy a thousand to test this out. I don't have, you know, $5,000 sitting around to test this out. So pricing is factory level and you can see a price table. So if you do order a hundred or more, you get a little bit of a discount, but you can even get a sample. So just get one just to check it out. Make sure you have it. This is good. If you're going to be recording videos for your business, it's easier to make those. If you actually have the product in hand. And this is what I really like is this alibaba.com order protection. So, you know, this gives me confidence before I order right on the listing, secure payments, easy returns, money back protection backed by trade assurance. So if your order doesn't match the listing details, there's built in protection that gives you official recourse, but that right there, verified suppliers, low minimums, factory level, pricing protection on the order. The core of why alibaba.com is great place to source products for your e-commerce store. So there are a lot of filters you could go by, you know, I want maybe five star need the delivery soon. I can pick what country I want them from. That's kind of their normal search, but they also have this new AI mode that I want to check out to newer tools. It speeds up this process, keeps it quick. So let's type in here, lightweight, foldable, aluminum, laptop stand for resale, low minimum order. So you can kind of just put your filters right in here and AI will take care of it and find the best match for you. Basically takes the manual search, but does it automatically. So an AI agent goes in and finds you the best results here. So just saves you some time instead of you having to click the right filters and things like that, you can just type in exactly what you're looking for. So AI just making things easier and easier every day. I love it. So in the second feature that makes things a lot easier is the image search. So this camera right here on the search bar, you can actually upload an image. So I'll just, we'll use this one that I just took and then it will search based on that image and find that exact product. So if you don't know the name of the product or something like that, you can still find sourcing for it by just uploading an image. So AI mode handles. I know what I want in words and image search handles. I know what I want. I see it, but both just gets you to a verified supplier faster. So just shortcuts to get you there faster. So start to finish sourcing this laptop stand that looked like this. You search it, filter to verified suppliers, compare factory level prices in dollars. Ask for a sample in order with alibaba.com protection behind it. So that's a product I could list in my store next week. So if you've wanted to start e-commerce and sourcing has been holding you back, this is a solid walkthrough of how to get through that and how to get started. So head to alibaba.com, try the AI mode, try the image search, find a product you would actually want to sell. So I'll leave the link down in the description. Thank you guys so much for watching. So let me know in the comments if you have an e-commerce store already. If you do put the link, I will check it out. I'll show it on my channel. So thank you guys so much for watching. God bless you all and have a great rest of your day.