How to Avoid the Top 3 Risks When Purchasing Spare Parts from China or the USA. Save up to 50% by buying on Aliexpress, eBay.

Service centers that purchase spare parts directly from China or the USA, via platforms like Aliexpress, Alibaba, and eBay often gain prices significantly lower than those of local sellers, sometimes with price differences reaching up to 70%. However, there are three major issues that every first-time purchaser of foreign parts encounters:

1. Orders may never be delivered; the seller might not ship the item, ship it to the wrong address, or the package could be lost by mail services. If you fail to promptly open a dispute on the marketplace, your money may be lost.

2. There is a high percentage of defective parts, and the time frame for checking and returning items to the supplier is limited. If you cannot identify and return defective items to the sellers on the aforementioned platforms in a timely manner, the cost of defects may outweigh all the benefits from overseas purchases.

3. Long delivery times make it challenging to predict in advance which parts and how many to order for the upcoming month.

Tool #1 – Order to Supplier. It will remind you when to open a dispute if the package does not arrive on time.

Here’s how it works:

When creating an order to the supplier, we specify the supplier's name, for example, Aliexpress; next, we indicate the delivery date (here, we provide the maximum date by which the supplier must deliver the order). Then, we select the shipment type as "International," which will help us later filter all orders from abroad. We also insert the order number from Aliexpress so we can link the database order to the order on Aliexpress.

Now we indicate the product name, price, and quantity. If we are purchasing the item for a client, we can also specify the client's order number so that the delivery date appears in the client's order.

As we can see, the order has been created and appears at the top of the list. The delivery date is 11/5. If the order is not logged into your warehouse by 11/5 or earlier (to log the order, you need to click on this item), it will start glowing red. You can apply a filter for overdue orders to check if you have any undelivered orders; if any exist, copy the order number from Aliexpress, find it on Aliexpress, and open a dispute. This functionality allows you to open disputes in a timely manner and not miss any orders. 

Tool #2 – Product Inspection. This will help you check items promptly and open a dispute if defects are found.

More about how the module works: If the package arrives on time, that's great, but now you need to inspect the parts within the timeframe set by the seller, and if any defects are found, quickly open a dispute and return the item. Upon receiving the physical package, verifying that the quantity of the ordered products matches what was received, we log the goods into the warehouse database.

At this stage, we access the second tool, where we input the date by which we need to inspect the items. Such orders display in blue, indicating that they have been logged into the warehouse. Next, we go into our inventory and receive the items into stock; each spare part is assigned a number, and the order turns green, indicating it is closed. We then switch to the "Items Awaiting Inspection" tab and see our order at the top. We can see the internal order number, the order number from Aliexpress, product name, quantity, the warehouse into which it was logged, and the inspection due date. Below this information is a list of serial numbers assigned to each spare part during logging and, most importantly, a list of repairs or repair orders (whichever is more accurate) that can check these spare parts. As we can see, the service center currently has two iPhone 5 devices, on which we can check our displays for the iPhone 5. How does the system know which spare parts can be checked against which orders? The devices we accept for repair serve as categories for the products. This means spare parts for the iPhone 5 are categorized under iPhone 5.

One day before the inspection deadline, the orders become pale orange, warning us that there’s only one day left to inspect the items. Overdue orders turn red. If an item has been inspected, we click on its serial number and it disappears from the list of items awaiting inspection.

Tool #3 – Purchase Forecasting. This will help forecast purchase volumes, taking delivery times into account.

Since items from overseas marketplaces typically arrive in approximately a month, predicting how many of which parts to order in advance can be quite challenging. Here, the "Purchase Recommendations" module comes into play.

We specify which products we would like to forecast, selecting one or several product categories. Next, we indicate the average delivery time in weeks for the batch (for instance, the number 4 indicates four weeks) and select the time period for which we want to use sales statistics.

As a result of applying the filter, we can see how much inventory we have in total, how much is available, whether we are expecting a shipment of this item and in what quantity, whether part of the ordered products is reserved for a client, our average monthly consumption rate, and if there is any unfulfilled demand.

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