How International Sourcing Actually Works When You Want a Manufacturer, Not a Trader
International sourcing sounds straightforward until you actually start doing it. You pull up a list of potential suppliers, filter by product, filter by country, send a few enquiries, and wait for the responses to come in. The problem is that a fair proportion of those responses are not from the companies you think they are.
The gap between what looks like a supplier from a desktop and what is actually a manufacturer of the thing you want to buy is the reason most international sourcing exercises produce disappointing results. You end up with a trader who has bought the product from someone else, marked it up and sold it back to you at a competitive-looking price. That’s fine until the first quality issue, at which point the trader points at the factory, the factory has never heard of you, and nobody is entirely sure who is meant to fix it.
I’m currently running an international sourcing exercise for a client where the whole thing turned on this distinction. The requirement is genuine, the categories are technical enough that a middleman is a risk rather than a convenience, and the volumes are worth doing properly. So we’re doing it properly. The approach is not exciting, but it works, and it’s worth writing about because most mid-market businesses don’t do international sourcing often enough to build a clean method for it. So they get the same disappointing outcome every time.
A desktop search that expects to be wrong
The first stage is desktop research. Trade databases, industry associations, sector directories, LinkedIn, and yes, the marketplaces you’d expect, though those are more useful as a starting point than as an answer. You build a long list of candidates and treat all of them as suspect until proven otherwise.
The tell-tale signs that a candidate is a trader rather than a manufacturer are usually visible from the desktop if you look. A product range spanning 47 unrelated categories, from valves to LED lighting to plastic mouldings. Factory photographs that turn up on three other companies’ websites via a reverse image search. A slick sales team but no engineering contacts anywhere on the site. A registered office in a business tower rather than an industrial estate. The address on the invoice being different to the address on the ISO certificate. A downloadable product catalogue that hasn’t been updated since 2019 but is somehow available in seven languages.
None of these on their own are proof of anything. Traders have to look like manufacturers to get through this stage, so they generally have websites that pass the sniff test. When you build a picture across a dozen data points though, the ones that are really making the product start to look different to the ones that are simply reselling it. The long list becomes a shortlist by dropping candidates that fail two or three of those tests. What survives goes through to an RFI.
RFIs written to weed out the middlemen
The RFI is where you make the trader test explicit. Write it as a generic capability questionnaire and everybody comes back sounding impressive, because the trader has a professional response team whose job is to make the trader sound impressive. The questions need to be specific enough that only a real manufacturer can answer them credibly.
In practice that means questions about the production process itself, not just capacity. Which stages of manufacturing are done in-house, and which are outsourced. What the raw material sources and typical lead times are for each. What tolerances the process runs to, and how they’re measured. What the failure modes look like and how they show up in quality data. What the last three ISO or industry audits picked up and how the findings were closed. What the engineering change process looks like when a specification is revised.
You also ask commercial questions that reveal the shape of the relationship. Minimum order quantities. Willingness to hold buffer stock. Tooling ownership. Indemnity terms. Response to non-conforming product. These matter for the eventual commercial arrangement, and they also expose traders, who tend to answer commercial questions confidently and technical questions vaguely.
The responses that come back split more or less into three groups. A small number that answer everything specifically and comfortably, with named contacts in engineering and quality. A larger group that answer the commercial questions well and dodge the technical detail. And a group who never come back at all, having decided the enquiry wasn’t worth the effort. The first group is the one worth investing time in.
The real work starts after the RFI
Everything up to this point is desktop discipline. The actual work starts once the shortlist is down to a small number of credible manufacturers. Video calls with the engineering team, not just the sales manager. Sample orders through the actual production line, tested against the specification. Third-party audits or supplier due diligence where the scale of the exercise justifies it. Reference calls with existing customers in adjacent applications.
That’s the point at which the commercial terms get shaped properly. Total landed cost rather than headline unit price. Currency and payment terms that reflect the real risk. Contract terms that account for the practical reality of managing a supplier several thousand miles away with different working hours and different assumptions about what a delivery date means.
None of this is dramatic and none of it is quick. A well-run international sourcing exercise for a technical category takes months, not weeks, and the majority of the time is spent in the boring end of the funnel, not at the negotiating table. The trade-off is a supplier who can actually make the thing you want, who understands what you’re paying them to do, and who will still be picking up the phone when the first quality issue lands.
For most mid-market businesses, the only categories worth going through this process for are the ones where the cost of getting it wrong is meaningful. If it’s a small spend or a low-risk product, buying from an established UK distributor is nearly always the right answer, even if the headline price looks steeper. If it’s a category where cost, quality or continuity really matter, the effort of doing international sourcing properly earns itself back, usually several times over.
The thing to avoid is the middle ground. Businesses that dabble in international sourcing without doing the work, buy from whoever answered the enquiry first, and then spend the next two years explaining to Operations why the parts don’t fit.
If you’re weighing up an international category and not sure whether the effort is worth it, that’s usually a useful conversation to have before the RFQs go out.