This User Guide will show you how to can make the most use of our services step by step. Of course, the easiest way for you is to register an account to have a dedicated Agent, who will handle anything for you at any time, so that you will have much more time on your core business.

Overview

As a sourcing agent and fulfillment center based in China, CSA has been acting on behalf clients to source tens of thousands of different products from China since 2006. Most of CSA’s clients dropship or import in bulk from China.

If you are an online business owner who runs one or more online stores, particularly, if you are a Dropshiper, you will find that CSA offers much more than what other sources offer to you.

Advantages of using CSA’s services include:

– FREE product sourcing service by a dedicated Agent.
– Prices of minimum 5% lower (on average) than the prices available on other platforms, including AliExpress. Based on that, CSA is also called as AliExpress Terminator by some clients.
– Great money & time saver for Dropshipers. No need for fulfillment Virtual Assistants any more, saving you Min $600 per VA per month. We will connect our ERP app to your stores to fulfill for you, and assign a CSA Agent to help you solve all kinds of fulfillment issues. No more hundreds of hours on sourcing products, on dealing with different suppliers, or on orders and shipping arrangements etc. for you. CSA will completely streamline your supply chain for you.

Traditional bulk import clients also find CSA much helpful, as CSA can usually help them to find more reliable suppliers and to negotiate lower prices, as well as better shipping arrangements etc..

Accounts & Subaccounts

Accounts

After signing up, a notification will be sent to your E-mail for the purpose of the verification of your E-mail. Once you have verified your E-mail, your CSA Account will be created. With the CSA Account, you may use of all the features of CSA as a customer, e.g. viewing prices of your products, viewing/placing orders, creating subaccounts, topping up Wallet etc. We also recommend you to register as a CSA Memeber. Once you have signed up as a CSA Memeber, you may enjoy the privileges’ offered to CSA Members (refer to this post for more details)

Subaccounts

If you have employees/team mates, you may want your employees/team mates to have access to your account, to see prices, to place orders, to communicate, etc. so that they won’t need to use your account to log in. You may use the Subaccount feature in such cases.

A subaccount is an individual account with its own username and password. As the Main Account owner, you can create, edit and delete subaccounts. A subaccount has permissions, including: permission to place orders, to view orders, purchase lists, etc.

• You can go to My Account -> Subaccounts to add a new Subaccount, to edit and/or delete a Subaccount.
• To create a Subaccount, you must choose login details (username, email, password), personal details of the account user, and set what permissions the account has.
• If the View all account orders/purchase list is enabled, the Subaccount can view all the orders/purchase list of the Main Account, otherwise, the Subaccount can view the orders/purchase list created by himself only.
• If the Main Account enables the “Place an Order” to a Subaccount and also the “Order requires approval” option, the Subaccount can place orders for the Main Account with the payment method of “Submit for Company Approval” only.
• If the Main Account grants the permission of “Place an Order” to a Subaccount and does not enable the “Order requires approval” option, the Subaccount can place orders for the Main Account with the payment methods of “Quotation Request” and “Bank Transfer“, and then the Subaccount may notify the Main Account about it after the order has been placed. The Main Account can make bank transfer payment for the order later. Sometimes Paypal may also be listed as a payment method in the above case, if the order amount does not exceed the “Maximum Accepted Paypal Amount”. If the Subaccount holder has been authorized by the Main Account to make Paypal payments (e.g. having the Main Account’s Paypal credentials with authorization), the Subaccount may make Paypal payments on behalf of the Main Account. However, due to security concerns and to avoid unauthorized payments, a Subaccount is not able to use Main Account’s Wallet balance to make payments.
• If the Main Account grants the permission of “Place an Order” to a Subaccount and does not enable the “Order requires approval” option, but the Subaccount still wants to submit the items to be purchased for the Main Account’s review, then alternatively, a Subaccount can add products to cart and save them as a Purchase List for the Main Account and then notify the Main Account. In such case, the Main Account can log into his own account, check the Purchase List, add the items in the Purchase List to Cart (which will be just a couple of clicks), and then make payment accordingly.
• If your colleague already has an account (which is not a subaccount) and both of you want to change his account into a subaccount, then both of you can contact us or message us via the chat icon on the button right to ask for such change. After verification, we will help you with the change.

Prices

Since there are tens of thousands of products with prices that may fluctuate from time to time, CSA mainly offers the products on a quotation basis.

• If you are a CSA Member (even as a free member), you may submit a Product Sourcing Request to ask us to source the products for you with priority. If you are not a CSA Member yet, you may sign up as a member here.
• Our quotes will usually be minimum 5% lower than you can find in the market under the same conditions (same quality, quantity and similar shipping time).
• Once a quotation has been made regarding any product, that product will be listed in the “My Products” category and will be exclusively visible to you only. You may place purchase orders for such products and make payments for them directly.

Payment Methods

There are several payment methods available:

Wallet

Wallet is a virtual wallet that you may deposit your funds in advance, so that you can use the Wallet balance to pay your orders any time, without needing to wait for your payment arriving to our bank account (it may take a couple of days for the arrival of Bank Transfer payments from some countries).

Wallet is super useful for speeding up and streamlining the fulfillment process, and therefore is most welcome by veterans of dropshipping business who attach the most importance to customer satisfaction. Besides shortening the time for payment, using Wallet will help you avoid unexpected accidents in payments. For example, your payment collection portal may temporarily freeze your account (e.g. if there are too many customer complaints) – in such case, having enough balance in your Wallet will help you though the hard time of the account being temporarily frozen.

As long as there’s enough balance in your wallet, you may use the balance directly for your orders. What’s more, if you have connected your online stores to our ERP application, we will, with your advance authorization, fulfill your new orders once they are received by spending your Wallet balance. As you can see from the above, the Wallet and enough Wallet balance is much important for the seamless operation of your dropship business.

In sum, Wallet is your best weapon to keep customers satisfaction and keep the fulfillment streamlined. You may always top up your Wallet or check your Wallet transaction history here.

Bank Transfer

Bank Transfer is also the major payment method to make payments and top up your Wallet. After you choose the Bank Transfer in the Checkout page and click the “Place Order” button, you will receive a message containing a URL to the list of CSA accounts to which you may make the bank transfer payment.

If you have a Payoneer or Paypal account, you may also make the payment manually from your Payoneer/Paypal account to CSA’s Payoneer/Paypal account, which will be free of charge by Payoneer/Paypal if you follow CSA’s instructions when making such payment. Based on that, they are categorized under Bank Transfer payment method as well.

Please make sure your bank transfer payment is made to an account listed on the official bank account information page only. An official page of CSA will have its URL starting with “https://chinesesourcingagent.com“.

Quotation Request

Quotation Request is a virtual payment method indicating that you are requesting quotation only, not making a real payment.

If you place an order by choosing the payment method of “Quotation Request”, CSA will receive the order indicating the payment method as “Quotation Request”. Quotation with details will be sent to you as soon as possible.

Paypal

You may choose “Paypal” as the payment method to pay via Paypal from your Paypal account, your debit card or credit card at the Checkout page.

There will be an extra 5% payment portal fee charged by Paypal if you choose Paypal as payment method on the Checkout page. To avoid the payment portal fee, a better alternative is to choose the Bank Transfer payment method to pay directly from your Paypal account to our Paypal account, by choosing the “pay to a friend” when making the Paypal payment.

For risk control purpose, there is a maximum order amount to be paid via Paypal directly on the Checkout page (“Maximum Accepted Paypal Amount“), which is US$500 currently and may be adjusted by CSA from time to time at its own discretion. If you want to make payments over US$500 via Paypal, please choose the Bank Transfer payment method, find our Paypal account details from the Bank Transfer Instructions received after placing the order, and pay from your Paypal account via the “Pay to a friend” portal on Paypal’s admin panel, and then submit relevant information via the order support ticket of that order.

Submit for Company Approval

This is a special payment method for Subaccounts. When creating and/or configuring a Subaccount, the Main Account may configure to allow the Subaccount to “Place an Order”; and when doing so, there will be an additional option to choose whether “Order requires approval”. If the Main Account enables the “Order requires approval” option, the Subaccount will have the “Submit for Company Approval” as the only payment method when it places orders on behalf of the Main Account.

Shipping Methods

CSA works with many couriers and shipping companies. CSA can help you ship with different couriers and shipping companies based on your requests on shipping time and costs etc.. However, to avoid providing excessive information, our quotation will usually include the cost of the shipping method based on the communications with you, and you will see only one shipping method: Shipping Inclusive, which means:

• If you are a non-inventory dropshipper (you do not store goods in our warehouses and we will order inventory for you or use our inventory to dropship for you), the prices we quoted will usually include the shipping costs based on the communication with you regarding the destination countries and reasonable shipping time etc..
• If you are an inventory dropshipper (you store your goods in our warehouses and we will dropship the goods for you immediately after you receive orders from your customers) or a bulk importer, the prices you paid for the stocks may exclude the shipping costs (here, “Shipping Inclusive” means “Shipping has not been paid yet”). You may pay the shipping costs after it has been finalized based on the shipping addresses and desired shipping time etc.
• You may estimate the fulfillment costs here.

Order Communication

There is a “Order Communication” section under the order details on each individual Order details page. You may communicate with us for any issues regarding that specific order. With such feature, your communication with us will be more purposeful. For example, you may discuss the quotes of the items requested to be quoted in that order only, or indicate the Order# of your store which is dropshipped under this Order, for better project management.

Fulfillment

CSA fulfills 10K+ orders per day for global clients.

• If you are a non-inventory dropshipper (you do not store goods in our warehouses and we will use our inventory to dropship for you), we will use our own inventory or place orders for inventory to factories to dropship for you within 1 business day after we have received your payment. If we have inventory to dropship for you, your shipments will be shipped out within 1 business day after we have received your payment, except for super busy seasons, e.g. for Black Friday holidays. If we have to place orders for inventory to factories for you, considering the shipping time from the suppliers to our warehouses, the processing time may be 1-3 days after we have received your payment. Time needed will be longer if the factory we are ordering from does not have stocks of the product.
• If you are an inventory dropshipper (you store your products in our warehouses and we dropship the goods for you immediately after you receive orders from your customers), then in most cases, the processing time will be 1 business day after we have received your order, provided that the shipping cost has been paid already, or 1 business day after we have received your payment of the shipping cost if the shipping cost has not been paid when we receive your order.
• If you are a bulk inventory importer, we will contact you for discussion within 1 business day after we have received your quotation request.

Quick Order

Quick Order is a super useful feature for dropshippers and bulk purchasers who will usually put many items in one order. In such cases, you might want to collect the information of all the items in your order in one spreadsheet when placing your order. Sometimes, you may also need to re-order some items repeatedly from time to time, especially for your best selling products. There are several ways that you can use to expediate your ordering process:

Quick Order via CSV sheet

You may add products to the cart quickly by importing a CSV sheet with product SKU and product quantity. This is the quickest way to add products to cart if there are quite a few products that you want to buy at the same time. You may order quickly by importing CSV sheet here.

Please note that you are not able to the choose product branding options if you order in this way.

Search & Bulk Order

You may search any product via the search bar and add the product to the cart. As an alternative, you may also search and bulk order the products via the My Account -> Bulk Order menu, where you can search by product name or SKU and then add the products to the cart in bulk. You may also do it here. Please note that you are not able to the choose the product branding options if you order in this way.

Purchase List

You may have used Wishlist before, where you can put items in the Wishlist first and then go back to buy that items later. Traditionally, if we add an item in a Wishlist to cart from the Wishlist, the item will be removed from the Wishlist to the cart and no longer listed in the Wishlist. Purchase List is similar to Wishlist, where you can add and save items (and quantity thereof) to the Purchase List and then add such items to the cart to purchase later. However, it’s better than Wishlist for repeated buyers as its main purpose is for your convenient re-ordering. You may open a Purchase List and add the items in the Purchase List to the cart. The Purchase List will keep unchanged after you add the items in the Purchase List to the cart. With the Purchase List, you can add the same items to the cart unlimited times, which will make it easier for your re-ordering. You may create as many Purchase Lists as you want for your convenience.

To create a Purchase List, you may add products to the cart, and then click the button of “Save as purchase list” on the Cart page to save all the items in the cart as a Purchase List. You may also create a Purchase List directly at My Account -> Purchase Lists. Please note that you are not able to the choose product branding options if you order in this way.

“Order Again”

If the status of an order is “Complete”, an “Order Again” button for each individual completed order will show up in the Order List, as well as in the details page of that order. By clicking the “Order Again” button, an order with exactly the same items and quantities will be added to the Cart, including any product branding options that you may have chosen in the original order. You may edit the items/quantities in the cart and place the new order accordingly.

Branding

Many clients like to brand their products. As a Chinese Sourcing Agent, we help clients to do that as well.

In most cases, your branding needs are simple ones. For example, you may only need to stick a logo or barcode sticker, or you may only need a custom printed box/tape for packing, etc. In such cases, you may add special notes in your quotation request, or choose the standard branding options when you place an order.

On the details page of each products in the Exclusive Category, you will see an option asking if you want to brand this product.

If you choose it, there will be more fields to fill in / select for the branding. The prices of such standard branding options are calculated automatically, which means that you may select the options directly when you are placing a Purchase Order. The order amount will be calculated and accumulated automatically.

Please note that such branding option in the details page of each products in the My Product Category is for that specific product only, which means the logo sticker or the barcode sticker etc. you choose here will be used on that product only, one sticker for one product. If you have more than one product in the same parcel, and you want to brand the whole package, you will need to use the Package Branding Service.

Currency

CSA accepts multiple currencies. USD is set as default currency. There’s a currency switching widget for your reference of the amount in other currencies. Take a look at this article to understand how to calculate the amount if you want to make non-USD payments.

More Helps

We hope the above has given you a detailed idea of how it works when using our services. You may find more useful articles in the Support Center or in the FAQs section.

If you need any further help, please feel free to let us know by submitting a contact form, or contact a CSA Agent via the chat icon on the bottom right, or contact our WhatsApp +1 878 880 1688. We will be very happy to help.