Negotiating with Chinese vendors

[MullerEnergy-Australia]

While I'm still a bit of a novice in the world of Alibaba, I've now got 6 orders under my belt (over 100kWh total) so I've got a little bit of experience now.
One thing that really surprises me is how little room for negotiation there generally seems to be. I try every time after I receive a price, but a lot of the time, I'm just managing 5% off or so. Sometimes even 0%.
In the beginning, I was getting higher prices, so getting discounts were obviously easier to get, but since I've started speaking the lingo, their offer price and the sale price tend to be pretty close.

It surprised me because in much of my experience in Asia, haggling was a must, including in China (from memory, it's a few years ago that I went).

Am I doing it wrong?

What are your experiences?

 

[HRTKD]

There are enough online retailers that we can shop for the best price without talking to anyone. A high price on a website means they're not likely to get any interest.

 

[jwelter99]

While I'm still a bit of a novice in the world of Alibaba, I've now got 6 orders under my belt (over 100kWh total) so I've got a little bit of experience now.
One thing that really surprises me is how little room for negotiation there generally seems to be. I try every time after I receive a price, but a lot of the time, I'm just managing 5% off or so. Sometimes even 0%.
In the beginning, I was getting higher prices, so getting discounts were obviously easier to get, but since I've started speaking the lingo, their offer price and the sale price tend to be pretty close.

It surprised me because in much of my experience in Asia, haggling was a must, including in China (from memory, it's a few years ago that I went).

Am I doing it wrong?

What are your experiences?

It's getting tough to negotiate the price down on cells as it is a competitive market where demand is above supply right now. China still is challenged with COVID regardless of what the media reports - we have a factory of 8000 people over in Wuhan and still battling COVID and not running at full capacity and not expected to really be back to 100% until September or so.

What usually works is to get other stuff included for free. Bus bars, wiring, active balancers -- all this stuff seems to not have the same demand so they will throw it in to get a deal done.