Marketing and Business Planning

In doing business on the internet we must rely on much more than our normal trusty "sixth sense". Some say anything less than "extreme care" is a certain way to lose money when dealing with a potential supplier (or buyer) over the internet.

The internet is plagued with resourceful criminals who will spend months building a relationship under cover of professional looking websites complete with sending high quality samples they do not actually sell. They even steal the passwords of genuine suppliers' websites. So, at times, you don't know who you are really talking with on the other end. And, these criminals have been known to set up temporary real offices to give you the comfort of a real street address and phone number when you cross-check. Or, they copy the name and address of a real registered company onto a fake website, and so on. Variations in the criminal mind are endless in sophisticated schemes to steal your money.

Business-to-business ('B2B') portals does not and cannot represent to you that all it's supplier members are genuine. On Alibaba you have thousands of very genuine and reliable suppliers - more genuine suppliers than anywhere else on the web. But, as elsewhere,

The price to you of free membership in any B2B website is (a) take time to be aware of the unreliable nature of the internet (b) very carefully investigate a supplier once you enter into serious negotiations. Otherwise, B2B websites would have to charge big money for membership for themselves to check out all the listed suppliers for you. There are no free lunches in this world.

Good news is there are 1,000s of genuine suppliers on Alibaba. It's just a matter of using extreme care to sort the wheat from the chaff. And, more good news is that other topics in our Due Diligence forum aim to help you to learn how to self check suppliers.