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#678 – New Alibaba Sourcing Strategies for 2025

Join us as we sit down with Justin Liu, the General Manager for Alibaba.com in North America, to uncover some exciting new AI features on the Alibaba platform. Justin shares his journey from growing up in China and studying at Georgetown University to his experiences at Amazon, where he gained valuable insights into the needs of sellers. Now at Alibaba, he focuses on helping North American suppliers set up storefronts and list products to access a global network of retailers and distributors. This conversation highlights how Alibaba is not just a sourcing hub but a gateway for North American manufacturers to reach international markets, addressing common misconceptions about its services.

In another segment, we explore the challenges of managing tariffs and supply chain risks for sellers expanding their businesses on platforms like TikTok Shop. With Alibaba’s vast network of suppliers from various regions, sellers can confidently navigate international trade. We emphasize the importance of risk management tools, such as Alibaba’s trade assurance program, which safeguards transactions. Additionally, we introduce Accio, the world’s first AI-supported sourcing platform that transforms product discovery through a conversational interface similar to ChatGPT. By integrating with B2B platforms like Alibaba, Accio is setting itself apart as an adaptive resource for sellers worldwide. Listen in as we unpack these strategies and tools that empower sellers to grow their E-commerce businesses.

In episode 678 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Justin discuss:

  • 00:00 – Alibaba’s AI Features and Supplier Opportunities
  • 03:39 – Alibaba’s Expansion in North America
  • 06:36 – Changing Landscape of E-Commerce Market
  • 13:08 – Account Managers and TikTok Shop Services
  • 13:59 – Managing Tariffs and Supply Chain Risks
  • 18:48 – Managing Risks in Global E-Commerce Sourcing
  • 23:24 – AI-Supported Sourcing Platform for Sellers
  • 23:46 – AI-Based Sourcing Tool

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we talked to one of the leaders of Alibaba here and in the US, and he’s going to talk about some cool new AI features you probably didn’t know they had, as well as a way on how you can even be an Alibaba supplier here. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We’ve got somebody who works for a company that has helped serious sellers for quite some time. We’ve got Justin from Alibaba here. How’s it going?

Justin:

Doing good. How are you, Bradley?

Bradley Sutton:

I’m doing just delightful. Now, since it’s your first time on the show. Always try and get a little bit of a backstory. Where were you born and raised?

Justin:

Born in China and raised up in China.

Bradley Sutton:

Where about?

Justin:

North part of China close to Beijing. Hebei province. Shout out to any of my friends.

Bradley Sutton:

My daughter in a couple weeks is moving to the southern the complete opposite and going to Hainan. She speaks Chinese and she wants to kind of immerse herself a little bit.

Justin:

Awesome.

Bradley Sutton:

Did you go to university there?

Justin:

Yeah, I did. I did go to university in China, but I got my MBA from Georgetown University, Washington DC.

Bradley Sutton:

Hoyas.

Justin:

Yeah, Hoyas.

Bradley Sutton:

That Georgetown. Okay.

Justin:

Yeah, yeah, the same Georgetown. Go Hoyas. Shout out to any Hoyas that’s listening to this podcast.

Bradley Sutton:

The basketball team has been quite bad the last, you know, like 20 years or 10 years or so, but maybe they’ll have a resurgence here coming up. 

Justin:

Who knows? Who knows? Yeah, it’s got its, you know, highlight, peak at some point.

Bradley Sutton:

And then, when you graduated from there, what did you start doing?

Justin:

I started working for Amazon between 2015 and 2020.

Bradley Sutton:

What did you do there?

Justin:

I took multiple roles. You know the retail leadership development program. I don’t know how familiar, you know, the listeners are to that program. You know the listeners are to that program basically. You know they bring people in, mostly MBA graduates, and they put you on like third party business manager, retail vendor management. You know vendor managers. You know it’s just a retail program that put you on different functions with the goal that you know, at the end of the day, you know they’re you know, cultivating people or talents, candidates for category leaders.

Justin:

That’s basically what I went through while I worked there. For roughly about six years I was the senior category merchant manager. I managed this third-party business for sports and outdoors category for a while and then I managed the retail business, the vendor management business for a tools category-hand tools, power tools. We were dealing with top vendors in that world. You know how fun that is. Before I left, I was a category head for home improvement.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s good. So you come from a background where you dealt a lot with sellers and understand now who you’re servicing in a different way. So, speaking of that, how long have you been at Alibaba and what is your position now?

Justin:

I’ve been with Alibaba roughly about two years now and currently my role I’m the country general manager for Alibaba.com in North America. So I oversee the Alibaba.com business for, you know, for US and Canada, mostly, obviously, mostly US.

Justin:

So my team is responsible for continuous to work with them and developing new features and programs to help them to source more and source more conveniently. Also, my team is responsible for working with US-based, north America-based suppliers, wholesalers. Help them to open up storefronts, list their products, brands, y-label or emerging brands, whatever that is. We help them to list their products and selection on our platform so they can have access to retailers and distributors who are interested in sourcing their products.

Bradley Sutton:

Let me actually just talk about that for a second, because I think that’s different than what people think about Alibaba. Of course, Alibaba is known for sourcing the leader in the world in sourcing. But then they’re like wait a minute, I might be a manufacturer of my products here in North America or I might have my own kind of line of products and you mean I could be a supplier on Alibaba. Can you talk about that program a little bit because I would venture to say that probably 95%, if not more, of our audience might not even know that’s a thing.

Justin:

Yeah, I’d love to talk about it and provide a little bit more background and how we think about it and why this became, you know, one of the most important strategy for Alibaba.com in the North American area.

Justin:

I’ll share with you. You know some, some high level numbers. Roughly about about 60% of the buyers on Alibaba.com are online slash offline retailers and resellers, and these are people that are looking for people to buy and then resell. You know, be it white label or you know, light customization, obviously Alibaba.com is known for, you know, customizable products, creating your own brands. But more you know a lot of these people are also looking for, you know, just some sourcing opportunities where there is enough of a margin that they buy low and they then resell high in pockets and profit out of it, especially when you know the creating your own brand world is getting more and more competitive and capital heavy or intense, if that makes sense, you know, if you want to start your brand or you know your product line on Amazon.

Justin:

You know, more often than not, you have to be ready for you know some serious investment operation. And that’s why platforms like Helium 10 is extremely valuable to the wannabes, who are people that want to experience that or grow their business on Amazon. It is not an easy or sort of like a blue ocean market anymore. By no means it is, right. When I joined Amazon back in in 2015, you can still just go and create our own brand and really focus your own product, addressing some sort of you know, unmet concerns or needs in the market and still make a pretty good money out of it, but not today. Right, you have to be somewhat like a professional seller. Right, you got to know what you’re doing. You got to continuously optimize your supply chain marketing. You know ACoS and everything. It’s a holistic, it’s a business. Right, it’s not a hobby anymore. So we do have a lot of retailers and buyers that are interested in buying and reselling and are not ready to create their own brand per se, that kind of heavy investment. They’re just looking for a product they can buy in bulk at a discount and resell at maybe 20, 30 percent margin and make a profit out of it. That’s the largest profile or persona of the buyers that we have on Alibaba.com today and that means there is a huge demand, a hunger for products that you can resell, buy with a price advantage and then resell. So you know, on the other hand, on the flip side of the coin for sellers on Alibaba.com right historically, yes, there are a lot of manufacturers, factories that are doing OEM light customization. But we’re seeing an increasingly amount of people that are just offering ready-to-ship selection. It’s already made, it’s wide-labeled or maybe got its own factory name printed on it. People don’t really care about it.

Justin:

You know, if they’re just reselling on Shopify, eBay, Amazon, some random e-commerce and there are their own storefronts, obviously there is a process. You’ve got to pick what you like. You’ve got to pick the best bluetooth headphone out of 100 or 200 bluetooth headphones on Alibaba.com. You’ve got to be the one that picked the right product for your audience or for your buyers. But it doesn’t mean as a buyer on Alibaba.com you have to customize it. You have to invest and buy 5,000 units to start your business. You can just buy 20 units. If the cost, if the price is right, there is a profit.

Justin:

So for sellers, especially wholesalers that I’m talking about right In the US, that are based in the US, have inventory sitting in their US warehouse and looking for serious business buyers that are not just buying one unit, two unit, that are, you know, trying to buy in bulk, 50 units, maybe four or five hundred dollar order value. We have a lot of those buyers and, historically speaking, for wholesalers that are trying to distribute to a community or a group of more serious business buyers, they got to rely on their own network, they got to rely on sales team or they have to go to some kind of trade shows. And if they go to a trade show, you know how expensive that could end up being right. So if you open up a store on Alibaba.com, list your brand, list your products properly, you know, clean it up, present your store. It’s like your own store. It’s a virtual store but it’s like your own wholesale store.

Justin:

And we will send, you know, serious business buyer to your store. There will be foot traffic, there will be, you know, negotiation, communication because it’s B2B. So people might ask you questions how about? What kind of discount do I get if I buy over 500 units. That’s normal, right. That’s what you do when you have a sales team and do business offline. We have all of those that facilitate our wholesalers to run a business just like how they’re doing offline, except it’s much economical. It’s much affordable for them to acquire serious buyers through Alibaba.com versus the more conventional trade show or sales team way.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so I think this can go two different ways. On one hand, first of all, do I think hey, start an Amazon business by sourcing this way from domestic base? Amazon business by sourcing this way from domestic base? Probably not, because the price is just going to be, you know, a lot higher for domestic and the odds that nobody, you know like competition is very low.

Bradley Sutton:

However, TikTok shop is a place where people are starting businesses you know now, where it’s kind of like wide open compared to Amazon, and I think it’s very likely like something starts trending on TikTok shop.

Bradley Sutton:

You don’t want to wait to have to source it from China or from Pakistan or something like that. You might be able to find something to hit a trend from a local supplier and is the margin going to be as much as you know would be if you sourced it from Alibaba in China or something like? Probably not, but price is not the issue. It’s time you know you can get something you know based in California, like in three days, and put it on TikTok shop right away, where it would take like maybe two months to get from China. So that’s one interesting angle for this. But then the flip side also, if I am interested in being like a supplier or wholesaler I guess, as you can say, your distributor, however you want to call it and list on Alibaba, how do I do that? Like, where do I go to open, you know that relationship with Alibaba?

Justin:

Yeah. So it’s super easy to become a, you know, supplier, slash seller on Alibaba.com. You go to Alibba.com website and on the top right hand corner there’s a button that says become a supplier. You click on that. You leave your you know email information, cell phone, register a Alibaba.com account. Our accounts are set up in a way that allows you to sell and buy at the same time within one account. So once you register account it enables you to buy immediately. But in order to sell you have to sort of like upgrade it.

Justin:

And you know, for those that are familiar with Alibaba.com we do charge a $1,999 annual membership fee. All you need to do is just you know in your account, click you know I want to sell and then pay that fee with your credit card. Or if you need to do is just you know in your account, click you know I want to sell and then pay that fee with your credit card. Or if you want to learn more about it, you know we have sales team that we reach out to you, provide you a demo and tutorials and stuff and explaining how to run a business. You know you can do it after sort of. You know you make your decision.

Justin:

The nice part of it is, you know, not only do we have a sales team, we also have account managers based in the US. Once you register, what normally will happen is we will either create a WhatsApp group or an email thread where you have access to two account managers, one from the US, one from the sales channel that onboarded you. So you have someone as answer your questions. You know 24/7. And then you also have someone from Alibaba, worked for Alibaba, employed by Alibaba to you know to do account health checks. You know diagnosis and helps you understand how you should, what you should do with more products, run some advertisement, whatever that is to drive your business.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Cool. All right. So there’s something new that maybe some of our you know community out there didn’t know about. So thank you for that.

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Bradley Sutton:

Another topic I think that’s hot here this year and that’s the T word of tariffs. And so people are when they think about like wait a minute now, I should probably never consider Alibaba a factory from China or something because the tariffs are just out of control. But there’s actually ways that Alibaba can you know, if you’re sourcing with Alibaba, you can actually help reduce some of this tariff impact. So how is that possible?

Justin:

Yeah, I mean, I don’t want this to sound like you know, we have the super bullet, we have the recipe that takes care of tariff, and you know I don’t have an answer like that. Alibaba.com is here to help, obviously, you know, not because you know, oh, we have this cool feature, we have this new program, because it doesn’t work that way. Right, you know, a tariff is a tariff. Someone is swallowing that cost. But the most valuable thing on Alibaba.com today is, again, our sellers, our 3P sellers. Just like how the 3P sellers are creating value, delivering better experiences to Amazon or Walmart buyers, Alibaba.com suppliers from different parts of the world are creating value to our buyers, which is, you know, the sourcers, the brand owners.

Justin:

We have a total of 200,000 suppliers that are actively selling on Alibaba.com today, and remember that each, every single one of them probably paid somewhere around $2,000 a year, so they’re taking this seriously. It is not some sort of, like you know, zombie accounts that someone never check it. These are active business owners who paid money to open up a store and present their selection to buyers worldwide. And this 200,000 suppliers, I know a lot of, you think, oh, the majority of them are from China. Yes, the majority of them do are from China, because China is the factory of the world, you know, in most of the categories that are top selling on Amazon or TikTok today, there is probably some, a lot of factories that are, you know, capable of manufacturing at low cost and great quality from China. But we also have suppliers from all over the world, from Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Thailand. We have hundreds of sales team and business development team based in those countries that are knocking doors of different factories and trying to, you know, bring those selection to Alibaba.com.

Justin:

And we have sellers from Europe. We have sellers from Italy, France, we have sellers from US and that’s what my team is doing, you know. We have sellers from Mexico, we have sellers from Middle East, everywhere. We have hundreds, again hundreds, of people based in Europe that are, you know, working with different trade organizations, trying to bring the best of the best suppliers and manufacturers in different regions. That really represents the quality right and the reputation of a lot of oftentimes, of that country right to Alibaba.com. So our buyers have access to them. And that’s the most valuable thing that Alibaba.com provides to our buyers to mitigate the risk of, you know, tariff, the trade frictions, whatever that is. You have the largest pool and community of high quality suppliers that are creative, that are just like you entrepreneurs. They want to grow their business, they’re flexible, they will look up, they’ll figure out ways to make this business continue to run and not be impacted by tariff. That’s the most important value that we could offer to buyers today.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so things are hopefully going to get more stable when it comes to that. But just in general, regardless of tariffs or anything else that’s out there, I think something that especially newer sellers are concerned about and it can even be experienced sellers  is, a lot of times we are dealing with, you know, suppliers, companies, trading companies, whatever factories that maybe we have never met in person, they’re from a country that we are not in. You know, like, if I buy from an American company, here there’s like there’s certain things like laws and stuff where it doesn’t save me from getting ripped off, but I know it’s a little bit less likely due to the laws that exist in this country. But then now all of a sudden we’re talking about hey, I’m going overseas, to China or somewhere else to negotiate a deal and perhaps send thousands of dollars before I see a product. So that’s something, in my opinion, like always Alibaba has helped with, like with the trade assurance program and things like that. But what are some things like the trade assurance you can talk about that like some people might not know about that that can help set sellers’ minds a little bit at ease, where it’s not just you’re blindly sending thousands of dollars and you’re never going to see it again.

Justin:

Yeah, I think you’re right on the point. Sellers at different stages, their appetite for risk management or handling risks are a lot different. Someone who just opened up their TikTok store and trying to catch the trend versus someone who’s been selling on Amazon for five years. We’re talking about totally two different mindsets. And what I was just talking about is really I think it applies more to the professional sellers that are more experienced than knows what they’re doing, more sophisticated and forward-looking and thinking and planning about their supply chain optimization, diversification but yet there is a huge community of people that just starting their voyage right. They’re just starting their e-commerce journey.

Justin:

Alibaba.com is here to help again. We have launched our US local stock to our buyers. We started, you know, really heavily, heavily investing in working with US-based sellers, especially those that have inventory sitting in a US warehouse in LA or Atlanta or Jersey, somewhere that’s close by to our buyer community. We started working with them a couple of months ago and we’re so lucky that we have accumulated a pretty active community of suppliers and sellers based in the US, with hundreds of thousands of products that are available to US buyers that will be shipped out in 48 business hours and arrive at your factory or your warehouse within seven business days. Right now, in total we have roughly about 300,000 products and our goal by the end of this year is to grow that number to 2 million and it will be like I was saying, these are products that are again selling in bulk mostly. So there is MOQ, average order value. We’re talking about $300, $400. You know it’s gonna be higher than team who hired and TikTok shop, but it’s still pretty manageable for someone just starting right.

Justin:

So what I think, what would this allows our buyers to do, is really you, you know, to act quickly and pivot. You know, just give an example. You know, you see something that you know become sort of catch the trend on TikTok shop, you know, or you know just on TikTok platform in general and you want to try it out and sell it, you know, by yourself. You should come to Alibaba.com and check out our selection with a tag that says local stock. It says local stock on the product. Right on the bottom of the product image. That means it will be shipped out in 48 business hours and arrive in seven business days.

Justin:

Buy it, you know, list it on TikTok shop and sell it for maybe one or two weeks and see how that goes. You know it won’t be the end of the day. If it doesn’t sell, I mean you probably lose two, three hundred bucks. You know you can start and try out some new SKU, some new products right, because selling on TikTok is just about testing and constantly testing and testing and testing and see which ones will fly right. So the speed of you know you’re able to pivot is critical to running a successful business on TikTok shop. And once you find that product right and you’re, you know, starting to get the strong momentum of sales, you might be thinking, hey, how do I lower the cost by 10% and 15%? Should I start talking with the manufacturer directly and get rid of the middleman?

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Now, something I know absolutely nothing about. A lot of the stuff you’ve talked about. I have an inkling of knowledge about local suppliers and I mean the wholesale thing was a little bit new to me, that concept. I have heard rumblings of things like that, but somebody mentioned that you guys have this AI-based tool that actually helps with either sourcing and or even product discovery. And I don’t think it’s on your regular website, because I don’t see anything, or I mean, at least I don’t see something in the search bar that’s different. So what exactly is this and how can it help sellers?

Justin:

Yeah, yeah. So we launched the world’s first AI-supported sourcing platform. It’s called Accio, A-C-C-I-O. You can look it up. It’s a separate website, but we are stay tuned. We are integrating some of the Accio capability to our Alibaba.com main website and, if you know, check it out if you haven’t used it before.

Justin:

It is very powerful due to a couple of reasons different reasons, okay. So anybody for anybody that have dealt with, you know, working with a supplier from a foreign country, with a 15-hour time difference and a bunch of factories, you barely can tell the difference of these manufacturers, who’s better, who’s worse, like who’s the one I want, right, and there’s always a price range. What about the material, what about the quality, what about the weight, the dimensions, everything. Because creating our own brand and identifying the trusted supplier is a key. I think it’s one of the probably the most important supporting pillars to a successful brand. But still it is a lot of work because it’s manual work.

Justin:

Without AI, you are the one that’s sitting in front of your laptop going through this pile of information and trying to get some clue out of it. But with AI, with large language model, with machine learning it’s a lot easier because AI will read through all those data. You know we have data that we’re putting on the detail page. We also have data in our database that we’re not putting there because people don’t normally read it or don’t normally care about it. I’m not expecting, we’re not expecting our audience or our users to, you know, click on a factory and read through 10 pages, right, the history of the factory, trying to figure out oh now I learned something about this factory. It doesn’t work like that. But with AI it will compile all those information and make the reasonable and the logical choice for you. Maybe not make the choice for you, but at least compile the information and digest the information and present it to you in a way that you can easily process.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s Accio.com.

Justin:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

It does all that and then, but basically it’s reading like everything that you would normally see on Alibaba. But then you’ve got like the gen AI kind of interface where you can like talk back and forth and instead of just typing in a search term like you would on Alibaba.com. Like I was just looking there, there’s a product I was looking to source on Alibaba actually a couple nights ago for one of the public brands that we have here at Helium 10. It’s like a chicken poop scooper, and so I literally typed that into Alibaba, or actually first I did it in in the Helium 10 Chrome Extension on Amazon when I found the opportunity to use the Alibaba supplier finder that’s in our Chrome Extension. But then I went to Alibaba. But then, now you know, I typed in hey, I’m looking for a chicken poop scooper. That you know, has a 10 inch base and is made of plastic and stuff like that.

Bradley Sutton:

I wouldn’t have searched or I wouldn’t have used that kind of like you know, language or search, you know, in the search bar, because I knew it would probably give me gibberish. You know like it’s too much to overload a search bar on Alibaba, but sure enough, I like I put it into, this Accio.com, and it started, like you know, spewing out results and then, yeah, it looks like I can just click into it and then, you know, it’ll take me to the Alibaba listing. So how long has this been around?

Justin:

About a couple of months now. A couple of months. It’s got millions of users, people. You know it’s starting to get the momentum, get the trend. We’re constantly, you know, sort of the platform is constantly evolving very quickly, a lot faster than the Alibaba.com website itself, because you know Alibaba.com has been there for a long time. So we do want to sort of, you know, maintain, you know how it works in general, you know, not changing too quickly, but with Accio, it does offer us the capability of adapting very quickly in response to the feedback from our users. So you’re right about it, it is conversational. It is just like using ChatGPT or any kind of AI conversation interface. You can ask questions. 

Justin:

You don’t need to, you know, normally in a search and browse situation, there are filters, there are keywords you have to hit on in order to find the right thing. But you can just describe it to Accio. It will understand. And you can tell him hey, find me all of those products that are under, you know, $100 with MOQ lower than five. That’s just what I want. It will process all the information and present to you a smaller group but meets what you’re looking for a little better. So it is conversational, it is easier.

Justin:

And another thing that’s about Accio is yes, Accio relies know the digitalized selection and supplier data and information from Alibaba.com. It also includes a B2B wholesale selection from other websites and platforms, so you can pretty much think of it as a just a search engine for B2B selection, not just limited to Alibaba.com. Yes, Alibaba has a lot of stuff, but there are other platforms that are focused on different verticals. Right and Accio have pretty wide coverage in that regard and it is actually capable of compiling selection from Alibaba and from someone that’s outside of Alibaba and be able to do the comparison and everything for you.

Bradley Sutton:

I even did a search with an image and I was able to read the image and pull it up. So, guys, if you want a new way of sourcing and finding products and ideas, go to accio.com and it’s pretty fun. I can already tell I’m going to just be stuck on this for like two hours just having fun searching for new.

Justin:

There’s a lot of cool features that we’re building. We’re testing out and see what really entertains users. You can ask Accio to generate a e-commerce report for you.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Last question of the day is we’ve talked about some existing features like trade assurance, that Alibaba’s had for a long time. We’ve talked about some other newer things that maybe some people might not be aware of. A lot of Helium 10 listeners out there today. One of the things we’ve mentioned or maybe something else we haven’t mentioned the number one Alibaba.com feature that you think most of our listeners maybe have not tried, something that’s been underutilized, that you would suggest people go out and try.

Justin:

Well, that’s a hard question. We have a lot of new features, but if you ask me to pick the best one, not the best one, but the one that people should really try it out, I would say Accio.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, I was about to say if there’s something cooler than this, then man, that would be really cool. We should have talked about it more, but this is what I would have picked.

Justin:

Yeah, it would be excellent because it’s just so different. Try it out and compare it with how you normally source on Alibaba.com or some other platforms. It’s totally different and, like I was saying, it is explorative. It is also inspirational. So you know, it’s a good place to kill some time and look for some ideas. From Alibaba.com’s own sort of feature perspective. Like I was saying, we will integrate Accio to our website very soon, so do stay tuned, it will be Accio. I think we’re going to call it you quick very soon. So do stay tuned, it will be a Accio. I think we’re gonna call it something different. But right next to our search bar, where you type in and search stuff today, it will say Accio search. So you can search with two different ways, type out keywords or conversational.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, all right, well, before we go, I’m actually, like I said, I’m taking my daughter to Hainan in a few weeks and I’m on my way there. I’m gonna spend a night in Hangzhou and so I want to visit the Alibaba headquarters for the first time, and so I’ve been talking to some people over there trying to arrange that. Any local eateries around the Alibaba headquarters like hey, this is amazing restaurant, or you got to go to this one place. If I’m only going to be there one day where should I go in in Hangzhou, near Alibaba headquarters?

Justin:

Man, this is the hardest question to get. All I have to say, Hangzhou. Okay, do you know much about Hangzhou and Hainan?

Bradley Sutton:

Nothing, like my first time being. I mean, I’ve been to China numerous times. We have, you know, offices in Wuxi, Shanghai, Shenzhen, but I’ve never been to Hangzhou.

Justin:

Yeah, so in China we sort of, you know, a lot of Chinese people joke about Hangzhou. Hangzhou is from my perspective, Hangzhou is like the Seattle of China.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting.

Justin:

Yeah, because Seattle has Amazon, Hangzhou has Alibaba. It’s two cities that are originally they’re all nice cities, but they’re getting a lot of attention and everything because of the e-commerce, the tech, the development bringing people from other parts of the country. It attracts talents, right? Sure, that’s what Hangzhou has been doing and Alibaba has been doing in Hangzhou per se. And Hangzhou really, as a city in China, is known for its culture and history. So if you go to Hangzhou, you’re going to check out the West Lake, right, there are a lot of history about that city.

Justin:

People, you know, that’s what Hangzhou is known for, not necessarily for its great food. I’m not a Hangzhou-er, so you know Hangzhou people don’t be offended, we joke about it. We say Hangzhou is a desert, for you know delicious food. There’s just no delicious food, but obviously you know that’s a joke. Yeah, Hangzhou is known for its history and culture and like cultural relics, so there’s a lot of stuff for you to experience. Now this is probably the one of the best time to go to Hangzhou. It could get a little bit hot and humid but it’s still nice, you know, if you later, there are a couple of months, Honduras rains a lot. That’s another thing why I said it’s like Seattle in China.

Bradley Sutton:

That was the first thing I think of when I think of Seattle. Yeah.

Justin:

So you should definitely spare some time and go to the West Lake, check out the Leifeng Tower. There are a lot of cultural relics that are definitely, you know, worth a visit. 

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Well, thank you very much for the advice and let’s see what’s new next year. Have you back on the podcast, maybe 2026. See what’s new with Alibaba and thank you for sharing all these updates with our audience.

Justin:

Happy to. Thank you. Thank you, Bradley, for the invitation and appreciate it, and have a wonderful trip to China.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you.


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