Helpful Tips For First Time Importers - Part 1

At Wavecrest Limited  we have many year’s experience of advising clients new to importing and international trade.

Over the next few weeks we will be writing a series of articles on our blog which we hope you will find helpful and informative.

Our first helpful tip: - Do not forget to do your market research before commiting to buy goods from an overseas supplier.

We are contacted on an almost daily basis by clients, new to importing, advising us that they have found a “new” product for the UK market on the web, or they can source XYZ product at a particularly low price in the Far East and are going to make a killing.

Finding a supplier on the web is the easy part but only half the story!

Have you considered the following questions?

Is anybody else already selling the same product in the UK? - we’ve probably lost count of the number of clients who were going to be the first to import mobile phone accessories, bathroom fittings, electric scooters etc

Are you actually allowed to import the product into the UK? - for example does the product comply with UK safety standards?  Do you need an import licence?

What is the duty rate applicable? - for some products very high tariffs remain in place and even anti dumping duties which make the landed price no cheaper or indeed even more expensive than home produced goods. (We will go into duty rates in more detail on a later post)

Is the product suitable for  the UK market? - we had a client that imported very good quality flooring materials from North America but found to his cost that the particular colours he had chosen , although popular in the USA, were not to the UK buyers taste and did not sell.

Who will you sell your products to? - we have had more than one clients that has imported a container of “cheap” goods and waited until it arrived in the UK before even attempting to find buyers. Needless to say the stock remained in storage unsold for many months.

We hope the above will give you some food for thought when planning your import business. Please look out for our next helpful tip which will focus on terms of sale and contracts.

If you would like any assistance with your import shipping requirements, please feel free to contact Wavecrest Ltd at any time.

Tel: 01474 331146, E-mail: glen@wavecrest.co.uk

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