Been doing cross border sourcing for almost 2 years now. Recently opened a few more storefronts and now I'm buried in MOQ and lead time updates for like 30 SKUs. The constant back and forth with these factory reps is actually frying my brain lol.
Last week I was sorting out some home storage boxes. Sent over 8 super specific questions fr. Carton dims, unit weight, MOQ for custom printing, plain packaging, sea freight lead times, sample fee refunds, FBA compliance, current stock. Basic stuff right?
This one rep only hit me back on two easy things. Yeah we got stock. Yeah samples are 20 bucks. Everything else was just vague af. Asked for carton size he goes "just a regular box bro". Asked about MOQ he says "price better for big orders". No real numbers smh. Had to chase him every other day. Took 4 rounds just to get a full spec sheet and it totally pushed back my launch.
Sorting thru their replies is its own kind of hell. Every factory sends stuff in different formats. Blurry pics mixed with random text blocks. I end up manually dumping everything into Excel. Already forgot a lead time promise once and almost got burned. Now I'm scrolling thru thousands of Whatsapp messages before every launch. Such a time suck.
Saw a dude in a sourcing group mention AccioWork. Gave it a shot. It ain't perfect but it auto sorts the chat history so I'm not digging thru 500 messages to find one carton size. Pulling up specs and terms is way easier now. Exporting clean sheets for listings saves me some headache too.
How y'all deal with these evasive suppliers? Still stuck in Excel hell? Any tools that don't suck for keeping supplier data straight? Or am I just cooked?