When to Print Overseas?
With the world becoming a much smaller place now and things so easy to find on the internet, many people are searching for all sorts of new products and services internationally where labor, rent, equipment and overheads may be much cheaper than in your home country.
So when should you take the risk and source printing overseas? Well, that's a great question! And if I had the definitive answer I would have saved myself many thousands of dollars. I do however have a few lessons learned and some suggestions for those wondering if the time is right to take a risk.
I say "take a risk" because that is exactly what you will be taking most of the time by buying something overseas. Unless you have some kind of consumer protection such as using ebay buyer protection, paypal, an approved industry supplier or the like, you will most likely be paying for something upfront, which you will then just have to hope that when and if it turns up on your door step, it is exactly what you ordered.
With printing, unlike a specific branded coded electronics product with a model number, unfortunately there can be much more room for confusion and miscommunication. The best thing about having a local printer or broker is that you can actually talk to them in your own language, get samples, choose colours, see proofs and have a pretty good idea that what you are ordering is what you are going to receive. In the unusual event that what you receive is not what you ordered, there's also a pretty good chance that the mistake can be rectified or even legal steps followed if required for recovery of your money. With overseas purchases, this is more often not the case.
In my business career I have ordered well over $1 million dollars worth of printing from dozens of different suppliers and had many different variations of what I actually thought I had ordered. My suggestion is that ordering from overseas is a case of risk management.
If you are only ordering a product once and it has to be right and you won't get a chance to fix it and you can't afford for it to go wrong - don't go overseas. On the other hand, if you have time to build a relationship, have the printing expertise to be 100% clear on what you are ordering and that the supplier is actually talking the same language, and you can afford for it to go down as an R&D cost, and the long term benefits of price and quality outweigh a few hiccups, then do your research and take the risk. If you are able to do the latter, before ordering I suggest you send a sample to the prospective supplier and ask for a sample to be made and sent back to you. This may be at your expense. If the sample you receive back is not suitable, I suggest you ask for another with the suitable changes made.
Clearly every situation is different and everyone's assessment of risk is different. If you can start off on a smaller scale or get a smaller part order to assess the actual delivered quality, then I would recommend this.
If you are not too experienced or confident on the process then using a broker or an agent can also be a much safer way to go. At Loyalty Print, there are some products which we confidently order from overseas on a weekly basis and have them delivered quicker and better than a local supplier, others which we have tried from overseas and have now found a quicker and better local supplier, and others we are still doing the research on. At the end of the day, the decision depends on you, your timings, your experience, budget and focus. If you give Loyalty Print a call, we can save you much of the trouble and give you much of the same rewards.