In China, there are two basic types of suppliers that you will encounter: trading companies and factories.
Factories produce various widgets and normally have some type of machinery to produce these items although the sophistication of that machinery can drastically vary.

Trading companies do not actually produce any goods. They source products from other factories. And there very few trading companies have their own factories. A trading company can be considered as a source of multiple goods that are produced by various factories for meeting the demands of customers.

People often confused to choose trading company or factory to import their production. There are some comparisons between trading companies and factories. Firstly, factory owns lower price than trading company so that you can get more space of benefit. Secondly, factory focuses on producing various of goods which meet different customers’ needs. Trading company focuses on customers and give better service one on one. What’s more, trading companies cooperate with various of factories so they can help customer to find different kinds of products if they need. Customers will not spend much time on looking for other factories one by one. And most important thing is that trading company has many services which factory can not offer for customers. Such as: quality check, clearance of goods, transportation and warehousing service.etc. Trading company will deal with all these things together to make business convenient and pleasing.

Let’s take our company as a example. DOCEN footwear is a well established footwear trading company in China. We do shoes wholesale business in China. Our main products cover women’s and men’s sport shoes, sandals, flats, sneakers and casual shoes. And we build good relationship with multiple factories for many years. We accept OEM/ ODM customized footwear production. Customers import shoes from our company, no matter what kind package or labeling customer want to provide, we will try our best to meet their needs. We have sales managers to service customers one on one, so we can get most exact request from our clients. We will help customers to find other footwear accessories. If our clients do not have their own freight forwarding agent, we would help them to transport. Of course they don’t need to worry about the problem of clearance.