A wholesale market, what is it? In China there are a lot of extremely large and somewhat repetitive shopping complexes aimed at foreign wholesale buyers. There is quite literally a market for every conceivable product from human hair extensions to office furniture – you name it and there is likely a market here dedicated to it but you need to be careful .

While its obvious that you really need to know what it is you are looking out to order. what you may not realise is that your supplier is also vetting you. If you don’t know your product well then it will be assumed that you don’t know your market well, if you don’t know your market well then it is likely that you don’t know the market value of your product well, if this is the case then you may not be able to negotiate hard on the pricing as your supplier probably wont take you very serious. At worst they assume you are a novice, that just might pay over the odds for your order so they can make this months repayment on the new Porsche they have in the parking lot downstairs. Oh yes don’t let that drab outfit fool you, this guys are driving Porsche.

Section 1, the fakes.

In one section we have the copy goods or fake branded products depending how you want to call them. These are straight up fakes in varying qualities – usually not very good. If a product exists then there is a fake for it. Some are “kind of” convincing and I know of people here selling them as originals. Others are just terrible rebrands such as a Gucci phone or an Apple pair of trainers. These are the obvious things you will find here like copy watches but also you get some things you wouldn’t expect too.


These sellers will be quick in telling the client if an item is a “copy cat” in most cases, which is the general term used here for fakes. If they think you look like a bit of a mug then you may as well be told an item is original.

On most items the sharp eyed of us can tell an original from a copy, items like laptop or a mobile phone. On item like a memory card or an audio amplifier it’s a bit more complicated as the true “value” of the product cant be seen or felt in that instance. Though they look good and come in all the right packaging these memory cards and usb sticks all contain “fake memory” and will not hold the data they claim to.


The same can be said for these audio mixing desks. Every brand available, all with the correct paperwork, guarantees, boxes, accessories and sales patter. Extremely hard to tell if they are genuine or not unless you 100% know what your looking for.


This is where one piece of advice is quite useful.

You can’t buy new original branded goods from wholesale markets at vastly discounted prices. Why? Because if you could all the real shopping malls in China would not price branded goods at such huge markups compared to the western world.

Some of these fakes items are laughable .example Yamaha speed boat engine ?

These shops have a lot of great stories as to how they came across these goods and you would be forgiven for believing one of them to be honest, they can tell a good story.

Then you have the new kid on the block – The refurbished electronics sellers. I mentioned earlier that you would not be able to buy branded goods in the way you were thinking, well this is what I was talking about.

These are “genuine products” which did actually start life as a factory original item. They are stripped down with internals branding and replaced with Chinese copy parts. Hard drives, screen, processors, camera lenses, and casings are all stripped off and sold for a profit then replaced with inferior, but working replacements.
Also you can get refurbished models which units has developed fault at some point and have been repaired with original parts but quite often determining if the parts were original or not is near impossible.

These places are becoming more and more popular now as countless foreign markets emerge where branded originals are extremely expensive. Not for instance in the UK and USA where branded originals are actually quite good value. I am talking about African, Middle East and South American countries where high demand and low supply for genuine branded goods means that these lower quality refurbished models have a good market.

These refurbs are available to look completely as new, all in the correct packaging as if they had come straight from the factory. It’s a growing business here and one I have dabbled in myself. You can pick up a refurbished iPhone 5 here for around 220 gbp, there are a lot of markets out there where you can make profit on that kind of figure if your smart about it. Again just know what you are buying and keep sharp.

Refurbished goods come in pretty much any form you can imagine but all follow the same process detailed above. Some of them are pretty sneaky and only a true expert would know the internals have been swapped out for cheaper parts.

These sections have emerged to cater for the markets mentioned above but really I am quite surprised they actually get much business. They do infact sell genuine new branded goods but they are extremely expensive.

You have to remember that in some parts of the world it is next to impossible to nip out and get say, a 70” Sony Led TV. If you want one of them you will pay whatever the cost.


These types of suppliers are a little more straight forward to deal with because at least they wont spend the first 5 minutes of the conversation trying to pretend the product is a genuine bla bla. That doesn’t mean however you need to take what they say as gospel truth.

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