Chinese factory holding my inventory hostage unless I pay "storage fee" that we never talked about. What would you do?

Never tried it personally but anything is worth a shot

4 Likes

except for the FREE LOCAL STORAGE…

2 Likes

Selling on Google is real buying ad placement exposure within Google results and Google Shopping. One has to have a website to present the products, give Google links and then promote with Google Ads.

Google Marketplace is a cloud base area where you can build your website, back end data, and find api apps that might help support various industries. We would compare Google Marketplace to AWS.

If you run your website, have control over coding, can do some coding to meet Google needs, run Google Ads, then yes Google Shopping can develop into a nice stream of income. We would not consider Google Shopping as a plug and play arena. Google Shopping is more like building an online brick and mortar shop with all the work that a brick and mortar requires.

If you already have your own website, then it is worth a look into. If you do not own your own website, then there is a lot of work ahead of you.

4 Likes

Que la que hay. The free storage is in the email :slight_smile:

4 Likes

Thanks for your reply. I don’t have my own website. Ok Google Marketplace provides tools to build website. So is it like Shopify? How about the traffic compared to Amazon.com and Walmart.com? I’m willing to do the work if it’s worth it. If the sales volume of Google Marketplace is 1/3 or 1/4 of Amazon traffic, it would be worthwhile.

2 Likes

Por un ano o mas?! No mames wey.

But if you have that, congrats! With TA, you should win regardless.

Best,
T_T

2 Likes

Your supply has reached the same conclusion as you have.

This product has reached end of life.

Your interest is winding it down with the maximum of profit or minimum loss.

Your supplier’s interest is similar.

If you are still getting some sales from Amazon, you need to consider the potential cannibalism adding one or more additional outlets which may occur. Since I don’t know your product, I can’t offer an assessment.

Dealing with end of product life issues is always difficult unless one can afford a total write-off and liquidation channels. When I did that on a big corporation level the write-off was always the way to go, there was always other income which we could shelter.

Good luck

3 Likes

Why the crying face? (the T underscore T)?

1 Like

Thank you for your advice. What does “consider the potential cannibalism” mean? Yes I have a handful of products that are reaching their end of life. They still sales but nowhere near what they used to sell. I sell small kitchenware products. What’s the best way to deal with end of life products?

1 Like

I’ve been sad lately

T_T

1 Like

Hopefully that was sarcasm … because it made us chuckle :smirk:

But then ...

We see it as Lemon_Lemon

2 Likes

Same here. T_T In fact, I’ve been crying since after the Covid year (the peak all time high in sales). The revenue has been going down hill very fast after that. T_T

3 Likes

It sounds like there were some mistakes made here on both sides.
You basically had a non-specific handshake agreement over the storage issue. The implication is they would store the product for you for free for a “reasonable” amount of time. The problem here is “reasonable” was never defined. Maybe to you 1 year is reasonable, but to them that’s excessive and they want to be compensated extra for it.

It does sound like they’re just trying to extract extra money from you because you no longer plan on doing business with them. But the root of the issue is the fact that the storage terms were never clearly defined. Personally I’d be a bit nervous about having a foreign entity store my property for a long period of time as well. This could’ve been worse. If the factory folded for whatever reason you can bet you would never see your inventory or money again.

In the future I’d get an agreement in writing saying they’ll store for X period of time, and if longer, you’ll pay X$ per pallet per month. That should prevent any kind of argument over the issue.

2 Likes

There is no one best way.

It depends on the use of your time, pocket book, resources and opportunity costs.

If you continue to sell the product on Amazon and add another outlet particularly if it is a lower price, you may only shift Amazon sales to that outlet not sell more. This is cannibalization.

If you pull the product from Amazon and create an “outlet” you might have to promote your “outlet” to an extent which makes it more expensive to sell because that costs money.

If you liquidate the product, you could take a one time loss but never have to deal with this product any more other than warranty issues (if there is one). Publicly owned companies are likely to take this path, especially if there are other writeoffs in the same year. It was my favored route when I worked for big companies.

If you have multiple products reaching end of life, you need to face the bigger question, Do I have enough new products to justify remaining in this business or do I need to pursue other opportunities.

One of the effects of the internet has been shorter product life. It is harder to keep a cash cow healthy due to competition by far east competitors. This means you need a constant stream of new products and have less profits from mature products to fund them. And there is no safety net when you make a mistake in your new products.

In my consultant days, I did some very rewarding work in helping companies define their next generation products. It is not clear I could do that today or be rewarded as well for doing that.

4 Likes

Yep, that’s more like it.

Thank you for showing the brighter side of the situation. Totally agree. It’s better to get my inventory now. The factory could fold anytime or the next US president decides to hike the tariff even higher…

3 Likes

Hi Lake. Thank you for another helpful reply. Frankly I haven’t added new products for the last couple years because they were all failure unless I was willing to pump a ridiculous amount of money to PPC forever. Back in the old days (2017), I only needed to spend a lot on PPC during to launch to climb on ranking. In the last few years, major spend on PPC forever is a must which makes the profit margin even thinner or sometimes at loss. So, no more new products.

Thanks for multiple options. Another option that I’m considering is to keep the inventory to sell later down the road. I had one product that Amazon banned in 2018. I kept the inventory for a few years until Walmart came along. I’ve sold this product on Walmart ever since. Another example is Tiktok. I’ve sold a few underperformed Amazon products through Tiktok last year. Even though the volume is much smaller than Amazon but the profit margin is many times higher (Tiktok paid for shipping and only charged 1.5% commission). Who knows, there might be more like Walmart and Tiktok in the future. :slight_smile:

Interesting. I could say the same thing. My last corporate job before going out on my own was consulting. Like you, I had helped many companies creating systems. It would be nice if one day we all (people in this forum) get to meet in person (some kind of conference :slight_smile: one day.

5 Likes