Discount Giant was initially set up to help small UK businesses import items from china easily and effectively. It was specifically set up for people who didn’t want the hassle of going through numerous people and working through all the red tape that can be associated with importing goods.

Before Discount Giant existed my self and my business partner were owners (and still are) of a small retail outlet, during the financial turmoil that has been going on in the UK economy like most small businesses, our business had suffered and we had to look at other means to save money and to survive.

We have all heard how switching to importing from China could save us money so we decided to look into it more in depth. We researched websites; forums spoke to suppliers in China and people that already imported themselves. But what we found was that we couldn’t find just one person who could come up with an end figure with all associated costs or all we needed to know to actually get started and get our product. We had to speak to numerous people along the import chain in order to get an understanding. One of the main issues we found was that a lot depended on the actual goods you imported in and the associated costs and legalisation that came with a particular item to get it through customs and into the UK. This is the difference in actually saving money from importing or realising that it is more cost effective with just staying with your original suppliers in the UK.

From researching and speaking to manufacturers in China we knew we could get the items we wanted at a reduced cost. All the normal questions went through our heads like how do we know this supplier is legitimate, how do we know that we’re not going to be ripped off, or the supplier not deliver what was promised? We knew that if we didn’t get this right we would be out of pocket and getting any money back would be extremely difficult.

Researching could only get us so much information. To us, knowing with who we were dealing with was more important. I believe you can learn a lot more by actually speaking to someone face to face. That was when we decide to take the time out and actually go to China and see for ourselves what can be done and who we were dealing with.

In China we spent a lot of time meeting manufacturers and sourcing agents. We had previously spoken to all these people before, but we found that some of them told us something different to what they had said to us while we were back in the UK. Not that it put us off but it did help us weed out the goods ones from the bad.

In the end we found the manufacturers that we needed and also teamed up with the best sourcing company that we found that would meet our needs in China. Due to the nature of our business, we don’t just sell one item, so occasionally we would require a variety of different products.

Now back in the UK we had identified the products we wanted, worked out all the associated costs involved with that product in China we now had to find out how much each product would cost to clear through customs and to have it delivered to us.

In the UK there can be some very strict guidelines on what you can import and there can be varying taxes / duty, safety requirements and documents needed. The HM Revenue and Customs website contains all you need to know to work out what you need. But actually working through it and making sure you get everything right can be a quite time consuming process and even then you can not be 100% sure unless you then speak to the relevant person in HMRC.

Only after we had found all our associated costs in the UK we could then sit down and work out our total profit margins on the products we wanted to buy. In the end it worked out nearly double that of using UK wholesalers, and therefore far more cost effective for us to get our products imported from China, and that’s what we went ahead and did. Since our switch our retail business has survived and become even more profitable.

In the UK we know quite a few small business found that they were also experiencing the same problems we had and were looking to become more cost effective. A lot of the owners of these businesses were personal friends of ours so we told them what we did and told them to do the same. What we started to find was that they were really interested but either didn’t have the time to fly out to China and find the suppliers they needed or found it difficult to work out all the associated costs involved and money they could save. Which is when they asked us to sort this out for them, as we had already done this for ourselves, it was a straightforward process for us to work out an end figure. We just place the required orders and get their products delivered along with ours.

We were saving our friends quite a bit of money in the process and they began to order more, a lot of our friends were saying that they could introduce other people to us who would be willing to pay for the service if we could set something up. Which was what we did and that’s how Discount Giant was born.