Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

People join this website not to promote products, but to share their knowledge. It's a forum ABOUT marketing not FOR marketing yourself. If you have specific marketing/business issues you need help with, ask questions. Otherwise, please don't try to sell us your products.

I assume you meant you joined the madeinchina site to promote your products.

Here are the issues I see with it.
1) there are too many others on the site.. finding any one company is difficult.
2) I work with companies who do brand labeling and I have never heard of madeinchina so i wonder what its real traffic is.
I would much rather see you promote yourself independently. I am sure if you provided this group with your product, they would provide some solid brainstorming points for you in the future.

I'm wondering what is the benefit of a company being on the madeinchina site?

How many of your customers really care where your products are made, and if they do care, is the fact your products are made in China a deciding factor? I'm not being glib, I really don't know, but it's a question you need to ask/answer yourself.

Price, quality, service, etc. to me seem more important than product origin. In fact, with the perception of Chinese sweatshops, child labour and human rights issues, being made in China is almost a strike against your products. But again, you know what's important to your customers and I don't.

I agree with Frank, I don't see any real benefit to being part of the madeinchina site.

Wow -- this is how dense I am. I was thinking what is
MAD IN CHEENA? which is how I read that domain the way you typed it. Sadly, I didn't "get it" till I read Eric's post. One tip -- if you do want to advertise, and you're counting on the URL, type use MadeInChina.com.

Best of luck to you, this seems more like a directory trying to compete with the big boys, and wouldn't be my first choice of a place to target to sell my stuff.

Jennifer P.
XPRT Creative

:)

I'm going to assume this isn't someone from the MadeInChina Web site trying to get some free publicity.

Actually, the MadeInChina.com site isn't pretty, but for a site dealing in a huge quantity of products, it's rather well organized. This site appears to deal in quantity sales, specializing in products made in China, as the domain name suggests. I understand your question. Here's what I suggest.

Without knowing what your product is, where specifically it's made, who your target market is, etc., no one can answer your question intelligently. How to best advertise your products on that site depends on a lot of variables, not the least of which is how many competitors are advertising who are trying to sell the same product you are. You need to navigate the site over and over until you know it well. Then you should speak with the site operators and ask them how to best advertise your products because they're the experts on their Web site. You need to know their site's strengths and weaknesses so when they make their recommendations, you will be able to discuss them intelligently -- which is why I recommend that you spend a lot of time on their site. Take notes, determine if there are any patterns, look at what other people do and select a few to emulate, identify your competitors and what they do well, what they don't do well, and so on. Figure out what you can do better.

Among the many preliminary questions you should ask of the site operators are, "What is your advertising budget? Where do you advertise your site? Do you have a media kit? Do you have a rate sheet?" You're looking for them to have a large budget and to be advertising consistently in both online and offline media. What you're trying to determine is whether the operators of that site are investing in delivering consistent, quality traffic to their Web site, the people who will buy your products. You don't want the same people all the time, you want new traffic generated consistently, and you want buyers who are interested in what you sell and who can afford to buy in the quantities that produce your optimum ROI.

You would want the site's media kit in order to gather information about their operation and the results of the vendors who have joined the site. These are normally displayed as statistical results concerning their average customer (demographics, behaviors), average sales generated on the site, etc.

Good luck.