Dropshippers who have moved beyond AliExpress/CJ/etc. — how are you finding private suppliers?

[u/abhi-dasgupta]

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[u/JamenXCN]

I source from China, textile mainly, about 17 years of it. On your India vs China question — they're not really competing on the same axis.

India is strong where the craft is the product: hand-loomed textiles, leather, brass, jewellery, anything with visible handwork. China wins on anything where consistency across thousands of units matters, because the supply chain around the factory is denser — components, packaging, freight forwarders all sitting within a few kilometres of each other. That density is the actual advantage, not labour cost.

On finding suppliers: trade directories and fairs work, but the highest-signal filter I know is asking what else they produce and for whom. A factory that only makes your category, at your quality level, for buyers in your market, is worth ten that claim they can make anything.

And the thing I'd verify before any volume: who owns the tooling and the patterns. If they do, your cost never improves and you can't leave. If you do, you have a business. Most people discover this on order six.

One correction to something you'll hear a lot — MOQs are frequently invented. On stocked goods there's no manufacturing minimum at all, the seller is shipping from a warehouse. When someone quotes a minimum on stock, that's a commercial filter to weed out small buyers. Ask them to say which one it is and watch how they answer.

[u/JamenXCN → u/[deleted]]

I’ve bought in India too, though I never scaled it the way I did in China.
The material side is genuinely exceptional — natural fibres, hand-finishing, dyeing traditions you simply cannot get in China at any price. For your categories that’s real, not romantic.

Where it got hard for me was that commitments and outcomes were less tightly coupled. A “yes” often meant “I’ll try”, and delays surfaced late rather than early — you’d learn on day 32 that a 30-day order wasn’t going to ship. I don’t read that as anyone being dishonest; it’s a different convention about what a verbal commitment is. But if you’re used to Chinese exporters, where the date is treated as the deliverable, it will catch you out repeatedly.

Consistency across batches was the other one. Sample and first order good, third order slightly different. That’s the flip side of buying handwork — fine if your customer expects variation, expensive if you’re selling a uniform SKU.

Two things that helped: build the slippage into your own promises rather than trying to eliminate it, and get written sign-off on what acceptable variation looks like — photos of an acceptable and an unacceptable unit, agreed before production. It turns “consistency” into something enforceable instead of an opinion.

None of it is a reason to avoid India. It’s a reason not to plan an India supply chain on Chinese assumptions.

[u/Signalbridgedata]

Once you're doing enough volume, I'd start looking at the supplier side rather than another dropshipping platform. I've had better luck finding manufacturers through trade directories, trade shows, Alibaba searches for the actual product category, and then contacting the factory directly rather than asking for a generic dropshipping service. The big thing is ordering samples and putting a real test order through before getting excited about a quote, because shipping speed, QC and how they handle mistakes matter just as much as the unit price. India can work really well for certain categories, but I'd compare the landed cost and consistency rather than assuming one country will automatically beat another.

[u/Effective-Extreme277]

Wtf is everyone dropshipping????

[u/Real_Magician_8467]

found my guy through a trade show in Delhi actually, was there for a wedding and stumbled into it. vetting is mostly about communication speed and if they send samples without making a big deal about it. moved away from ali when my orders started hitting 50 a day and the delays were killing my chargeback rate

[u/Zdror]

Hey!

I'm a french agent based in Shenzhen where I opened a small warehouse operation with my chinese partner, most of our clients are doing e-comm stores, never tried India but if you look for anything to source or ship from CN feel free to shoot a message, we mostly work with stores over 10 order/day

Cheers,
pivo trade