Imported Tires From China

[2BLUE]

I own a store in Calgary and looking at finding a distributor of china tires. It seems everyone has these tires yet I am hitting a dead end on where everyone is getting these, just thought someone on here might have a way to direct me to someone.

[firebane]

I own a store in Calgary and looking at finding a distributor of china tires. It seems everyone has these tires yet I am hitting a dead end on where everyone is getting these, just thought someone on here might have a way to direct me to someone.

Would tires from "China" be DOT approved or legal for our roads?

[ExtraSlow]

Use the web? Usually the name of the tire company is in the adverts, so.... http://www.comforser.ca/contact/

[Sentry]

Are you looking for the standard Sailuns and Linglongs? Or even cheaper shit like I've seen on kijiji (WINDFORCE, WIDEWAY, etc)?

Alibaba and bring in a container.

[ExtraSlow]

Yeah, Alibaba and container is probably the right answer.

[2BLUE]

Is it that easy to just buy from Alibaba and be done with it? Seriously we get lots of requests for tires so I am seriously considering it, I just thought maybe someone on here has done it before

These guys http://www.abtire.ca/calgary/ import tires like crazy.

[KPHMPH]

I’ll partner with you and we can buy a sea can of semi tires. They are selling like hot cakes around where I work... especially when a truck changed 12 at a time :O

[corsvette]

I’ll partner with you and we can buy a sea can of semi tires. They are selling like hot cakes around where I work... especially when a truck changed 12 at a time :O

Have you run them? Any good? I outfitted a Peterbilt with 8 new China drive tires. The buyer refused them, said he'd rather run caps than 1st line Chinese tires lol. We swapped them out for Bridgestones and I sold the new china tires at auction.

[ExtraSlow]

Let's get a seacan of Dillon Dube jerseys too.

[KPHMPH]

Have you run them? Any good? I outfitted a Peterbilt with 8 new China drive tires. The buyer refused them, said he'd rather run caps than 1st line Chinese tires lol. We swapped them out for Bridgestones and I sold the new china tires at auction.

Out here they last just as long as Goodyears.

My trucks go about 60-90,000kms depending on how much back road they do.

Long March is the tire name - if your running the truck yourself then get name brand but if you have drivers get no name.

[2BLUE]

I ran them on a 5 ton for the last two years and they definitely work just fine / dot Hasn’t said anything about it and I am definitely sold on it

[HiTempguy1]

In the spring/summer/fall, tires need to be round and hold air

I buy lots of chinese tires, and yes, have looked at importing them. Hell, we rally race on chinese tires, people love them and they are 50% cheaper than the other brands.

[tirebob]

Like anything, some of them are quite decent while some others are complete garbage. You just need to figure out which is which, As for a business model, the wholesale Chinese tire market is as saturated as fuck. I personally would not want to try and start a business where you are competing with insane amount of others who are all fighting for the lowest priced stuff in the market. It is a recipe for failure. The margins are getting lower and lower every day and you are fighting for pennies on the dollar so you either have to sell massive quantities on a regular basis at a low margin, or sell a little at higher margins, but then you are beating you head against a wall against the established lowballers. If you are simply retailing the tires and not going after wholesale you will have different trouble. You are going to be having to fill an entire container but will probably only be able to order 12 sku's as you can't order 8 of this and 12 of that, so you better have a pretty damn good idea of what numbers are moving for you and realize you might get stuck with a whole bunch of useless shit if you guess wrong. I see it often...

There is money to be made in it, but it is tough to do on a speculative level. You either commit and go hard or expect some real growing pains.

[ercchry]

Could offset the guessing game on the sku’s by doing a group buy with part of the container with say the drifting community, it’s been done, those guys can give you orders of easily 12 tires each in the size they run

[tirebob]

Could offset the guessing game on the sku’s by doing a group buy with part of the container with say the drifting community, it’s been done, those guys can give you orders of easily 12 tires each in the size they runYep that stuff can help. People don't always realize that when you are buying a full can from the factory, they do not let you mix and match a bunch of sizes. You have to pick between a set number of items and minimum quantity of each item with a cap on the quantity of different sku's, and you can fit anywhere from 600 to 1200 tires in a sea can depending on size. That means a lot of tires in just a few sizes.