Finally I Am Back

So after a long haitus, I will finally update my blog again. For now I am in Shanghai, living with 7 other people in an apartment in Pudong, but for now I will continue to discuss what happened in Yiwu.

So I mentioned before, in Yiwu I met with a factory owner, a trading agent and many proprietors of the shops in Yiwu. Both the trading agents and the shops directly interact with the customers, but the factories more rarely will see who is buying their goods.

First off, it seemed that most of the buyers of goods were either from the Middle East, Europe, other Asian countries and Africa, because I rarely saw anyone buying from America. Apparently, though, this is because they rarely go the market themselves, they will just have the trading agent do all the work for them. And if they are a constant costumer, they sometimes won't even go to Yiwu at all to make the trades.

One thing I was interested in was the difficulties that the traders run in to, particularly when it came to specific nationalities or gender. One of the store owners, a 23 year old woman, said she had problems working with women that came to her shop because they would just constantly try and bargain but didn't actually know the absolute highest they were willing to pay. She told me that the men that came there had calculated everything out already and knew exactly what they would pay, and the transaction would go by much more quickly.

Most store owners also said, though, that women don't usually come to the stores and that it's mostly men that are buying goods. This was particularly true at a Muslim religious shop that dealt mostly with the Middle East. The one exception to this is that the buyers from South Africa are nearly all women, but none of the store owners seemed to know why.

When it came to nationalities, the two that most store owners seemed to have the most trouble with was the Koreans and the Russians. The Russians because they have a perception of trying to cheat the store owners and the Koreans because they are looked upon as being cheap. One store owner told me the Koreans and the Japanese would want everything down to perfect detail, with the best materia available but wouldn't be willing to even come close to paying full price.

Another store owner told me about a regular customer he had, in Russia, who had bought three boxes of goods before. Then, on their next order which they hadn't payed for yet because they were considered a good customer, they just never picked up the box of goods from customs. After sitting at customs for a few months, the customer then went and bought the goods back at auction for much cheaper than they would've payed the Chinese wholesaler.

This is part of what I did and learned in Yiwu. For now I'm in Shanghai, working for the entertainment company XPT (http://www.xptshanghai.com). I work weekdays correcting English in the office, and at nights at bars/clubs, where my job is to dance with the people and drink with them to make sure they enjoy the party. I'll start updating my blog more regularly, so check back soon.