There are two common ways to sell products made in China without a warehouse of your own. In the first, each order is sent straight from the supplier to your customer. In the second, you buy a quantity up front, it waits in a warehouse near the suppliers, and each order ships from there. Sourship works the second way. This guide explains what that changes, and when the first way can still suit you.
Shipping straight from the supplier
When each order leaves the supplier, you hold no stock and pay for nothing until a customer buys. That is its appeal. What you give up is control over what happens between the order and the parcel:
- Nobody checks the goods on your behalf before they leave. The first person to see the product may be your customer.
- Each supplier packs their own way. Two products in one order can arrive as two parcels, on different days, in different packaging.
- The stock is the supplier’s, not yours. If they sell out or change the product, your listing does not know.
None of this is a problem for every seller. It matters most when your customers judge you on each parcel.
Holding your own stock
When you buy a quantity up front, the goods come to our warehouse first. That changes several things:
- Every delivery is checked on arrival. We compare it against your request and weigh it before it becomes your stock. If something does not match, we take it up with the supplier while the goods are still with us, not after they reach your customer.
- The weight is real. Your shipping price comes from the weighed product, so the cost you planned with is the cost you pay. How shipping is priced explains the rest.
- The count is yours. Your Products List shows what we hold for you. Stock is everything we hold, Reserved is what paid orders have claimed, and Available is what you can still sell. Below ten available, a product is marked Low stock, so a restock is never a surprise.
- Orders ship from one place. When an order is paid, its units are reserved and our team packs and ships it, then puts the tracking number back on the order.
And it costs nothing to keep: there is no storage fee and no warehouse subscription. Your goods stay with us, with no time limit, while your plan is active.
“But I have to buy stock first”
That is the real difference, and it is smaller than it sounds. The quantity you buy starts at the supplier’s minimum and moves in their pack size, and many 1688 products start at a single unit. So you can buy a few units, list them, and see whether they sell before you buy more.
When a product does sell, press Request More on it in your Products List. The restock is priced and paid like any request, and its units join the same product when they arrive.
Which one suits you
Holding stock suits you when:
- you want the goods checked before any of them can reach a customer;
- you sell the same products again and again;
- you want a shipping price you can plan with;
- you sell in more than one store and want one count across all of them.
Shipping straight from the supplier can suit you when you are listing many products you have never sold, and you cannot yet tell which will sell at all. Even then, buying a few units of the likeliest ones is often the better test: you see the real product before your customers do.
In short
- Shipping from the supplier means no stock to buy, and no one checking the goods before your customer sees them.
- Holding stock with us means every delivery is checked and weighed, the count is yours, and every order ships from one place.
- There is no storage fee while your plan is active, and many products start at a single unit, so holding stock does not have to mean buying a lot of it.
See how the warehouse and inventory work, or how buying from 1688 works.
