I’m looking for some feedback and experience from riders who purchased a performance scooter, direct from the factory and Alibaba.

Are Sunnytime and Titan the only two that have really proven their ‘direct to customer’ reliability?

Are there other factories people have dealt with that they’d like to mention, either positive or negative?

I’d love to hear from people who’ve done their research and went out on a limb and purchased direct!

A little bit of background, I’ve done some selling on Amazon, including importing product from China via boat, so I’m kind of familiar with the process and somewhat familiar with Alibaba.

I know the cultural norms are different in terms of how their factories operate their business, and it’s sort of ‘less frowned upon’ to sell OEM stuff out the back door then it would be in a place like the US where intellectual property rights are held with higher esteem and enforceability.

In analyzing the scooter space in general, a lot of these brands seem to be pretty faceless aside from a name and website, and many appear to be originating in China, so it’s looking to me like a lot of the brands are either the factories themselves, or the factories teaming up with a couple of business agents to brand the scooters they’re producing themselves.

Anyhow, I’m beginning to warm up to the idea of possibly ordering a factory-direct performance scooter, partially just to test the process. I’ve seen several premium scooter models that are just $200or $300 cheaper than the retail models, and to be honest, to me that cost is is worth it for the warranty and brand support that comes along with it. However I have seen a couple at a fairly deep discount, and one thing I’ve noticed is that last year’s models tend to fall in price quite quickly, especially through the Alibaba channels. So I may look at buying a yesteryears performance scooter via Alibaba at some point.

Below is a bit of a rant on Chinese/US small business relations. I initially started typing it in the body of this message, but then realized that it was a little off topic and more of a rant, so I’ve included below, just for anybody who’s kind of interested or has some thoughts and experience on the subject! 😁

——————— Begin Rant———————

It’s always been interesting to me to hear people talk about the “crap made in China”, but what a lot of people don’t realize is the context in which that crap is being made, namely by and for US (and developed nation) based businesses.

The US consumer wants the lowest possible production prices, and so our businesses sought out the lowest cost manufacturing, and China became that place. But tons of what they’re producing is on order of, and developed by, US based businesses. We develop the concepts, we design the patents and prototypes (in conjunction w/ manufacturers), we take it to them to produce, and then we handle the branding, marketing, sales and business development of said products, because that is where we’ve learned to excel as an economy.

But in the background there’s been a growing trend of Chinese factories gradually learning to brand themselves by watching these businesses, and culturally they’re slowly getting better at marketing and communication themselves. There’s a slight background radiation of fear around this fact, because if this starts to become more and more commonplace the US could gradually start to lose its advantage, because in a race to the bottom they will always have the upper hand (economically they can go lower then us and still profit).

In fact a large group of global Amazon sellers got really kind of pissed off when Amazon released an “open call” to Chinese based businesses and factories, and began a “branding as service” program in which Amazon offered to provide its brand development and marketing efforts (kind of a brand ‘starter pack’) directly to the Chinese factories if the factories would sell directly to Amazon at a significant volume and discount relative to the competition.

So basically, Amazon began offering branding as a service direct to Chinese factories, but what buyers wouldn’t know (unlike Amazon Basics) is that these were actually in-house brands, which were a direct collaboration between the factories and Amazon’s marketing department.

The entire gold rush of Amazon prime was predicated on small individual business as being able to come in and develop a product line, crates and branding, so an Amazon themselves begin threatening to undercut those sellers it caused quite a stir!

——————— Rant Over!!———————