Export Guide · 01
Not a website first, and not a salesperson first. The first step is judging whether anyone overseas buys your product, whether your pricing holds up, and whether you can be found at all.
The first step in exporting isn’t building a website, running ads or hiring a salesperson — it’s judging whether overseas buyers can find you and trust you. Spending money before you can answer that is the fastest way for a domestic factory to lose money going global.
1. Who exactly buys your product overseas?
Don’t ask “is the market big” — ask for specifics: who uses similar products, through which channels they buy, and how often. If you can’t name three concrete buyer types, the market isn’t clear yet, and whatever you spend now is tuition.
2. Does your pricing hold up in the target market?
Take your ex-works price, add freight, duty, certification, packaging and commission through to landed cost, then compare against local wholesale and retail prices. Many factories make money at home and lose it abroad — and this is usually the step where it went wrong.
3. Can you be found right now?
Search your product’s English name on Google once. If nothing about you comes up, overseas buyers can’t find you — not because your product is bad, but because you don’t exist in their search results.
Yours, and only yours: product, pricing, capacity, lead times. These are your hand; nobody else can play it.
Worth outsourcing: website, catalogue and translation, social account setup and operation, buyer-lead screening. These are specialist processes, and learning them from scratch costs far more time than the fee.
The right order is: domain and business email → owned website → catalogue and localisation → social media → buyer leads.
The reverse order (buying leads or running ads first) almost always loses money: there is no landing page, so traffic arrives and has nowhere to land.
Mistake one: run some ads and see. Without a storefront that can take enquiries, ad spend goes straight down the drain.
Mistake two: hire an export salesperson first. With no storefront and no lead source, the salesperson can’t produce either — a few months later all you have is a salary bill.
Mistake three: bet everything on one platform. A platform account is rented; change the rules or suspend the account and your “overseas channel” goes to zero that day. The domain and the website are the assets you actually own.
Q: How much starting capital does exporting need?
A: The storefront part (domain, overseas hosting, business email) costs well under US$150 a year in cash. What it really costs is time — or the labour fee if you outsource.
Q: Can I do this with no export experience?
A: Yes — as long as you’re clear that you’re learning on the job. Processes can be outsourced; judgement cannot. Pricing, product and lead times have to be your call.
Q: How soon will I see something?
A: Once the storefront is up, search exposure usually starts to appear in one to three months. We don’t promise enquiry volume — nobody controls when a buyer happens to need something.
Further reading: What an export website actually costs · What export agency operation does