The Man Who Invented a Fake Chinese Person to Buy Boxes

I'm on a coaching call with a guy who's pivoting from real estate into physical product sales. He wants to sell bulk packaging - cardboard boxes, bulk bags, the kind of stuff farmers and manufacturers need by the pallet. He's done zero sourcing. He has no supplier. He has no product. He just found a competitor website, saw they were making money, and figured he could copy the model.

I respect that. That's exactly how you start.

So I pull up Alibaba, start typing, and within thirty seconds I'm showing him bulk bags at ten cents a piece, cardboard boxes for fractions of that. The market is real. The product is sourceable. There's nothing stopping him from going out and selling packaging tomorrow, figuring out the delivery side after he gets his first contract.

And then I said something that made him laugh. I told him that when my wife and I source from Alibaba, we always pretend to be Chinese. Full alter ego. Separate contact info. Messages run through Claude or another AI - typed in English, translated to Mandarin, sent in Mandarin. Because if you talk to them in English, they know you're American. And if they know you're American, they charge you more.

He laughed and said, "I could see Berman sounding Chinese."

I told him I go full in. I'll come up with a whole Chinese name, a whole persona. Whatever it takes to get the real price.

This isn't some crazy edge-case tactic. This is just understanding how open markets actually work.

Why Alibaba Suppliers Charge Americans More

Nobody on Alibaba has a fixed price tag. These are individual factories and trading companies, most of them in China, negotiating with buyers one conversation at a time. They size up the buyer. They adjust their quote accordingly.

An American company emailing in English, asking about MOQs and shipping timelines and whether they accept PayPal, looks like a certain type of buyer. Someone who doesn't know the real factory floor price. Someone who has budget to burn and a comfortable margin they're willing to leave on the table. The quote you get back reflects that perception.

A buyer messaging in Mandarin, using the vocabulary of someone who grew up around manufacturing, asking the same questions - that's a different buyer. Closer to the price. Sometimes dramatically closer.

I've negotiated with them as an American too, and you can absolutely make it work. I bought paintings off Alibaba as Alex Berman and closed the deal fine. But I've found it's easier when they think you're Chinese. You get treated like a trade buyer instead of a naive Western importer. The price reflects that.

What a "Full Alter Ego" Actually Requires

This is not complicated. It is literally:

• A Chinese name. Pick one. It doesn't matter. Use a common surname - Wang, Li, Zhang, Chen. First name you can generate with any AI in five seconds.
• A separate contact point. A different email. If you have WeChat, use it. Chinese suppliers love WeChat. It signals you're a real trade contact, not a first-timer on the Western-facing version of Alibaba.
• AI translation. I use Claude. You write your message in English, you ask it to translate to natural Mandarin appropriate for a B2B trade conversation, and you send that. They respond in Chinese. You paste it back into the AI and read the English. The whole thing takes ten seconds longer than a normal email.

That's the whole system. You don't need to speak Mandarin. You don't need any real knowledge of Chinese business culture beyond the basics. The AI handles the language. You handle the negotiation strategy.

Is it deceptive? Yes. Is it illegal? No - not in any US jurisdiction I'm aware of. You're a private buyer negotiating on an open market. You're not making a fraudulent claim to obtain government benefits or misrepresenting yourself in a regulated financial transaction. You're just tilting the information asymmetry back in your favor in a negotiation where the other side has been doing the same thing to English-speaking buyers for decades.

The Bigger Lesson: Validate First, Source Later

Here's the thing about the sourcing question. The guy I was coaching was worried about how to find a supplier before he'd sold a single box. And I had to tell him: that's the wrong order of operations.

You don't need to buy 500 units of cardboard boxes to prove you can source cardboard boxes. I can show you Alibaba listings for ten cents a box in thirty seconds. The sourcing is solved. What's not solved is whether anyone will give you a purchase order.

So the sequence is:

1. Call a competitor and pretend to be a customer. Not over email - call the number. Say you run a small manufacturing company and you're looking at packaging options. Ask if they can send over pricing materials. They'll send you a PDF. Now you know what the market charges.
2. See if you can sell it for more. If a competitor is selling at $1 a box and Alibaba has them at $0.10, that's your margin. Go test whether manufacturers will actually pay.
3. Figure out delivery after you have a contract. Not before. The market will tell you everything you need to know. Don't spend three weeks optimizing your supply chain for a product nobody's agreed to buy yet.

This is how I'd run it. I'd go get a contract from somebody - not a real binding thing, just a verbal commitment or a handshake deal - and then figure out the fastest way to actually deliver.

My parents did this exact model. Their whole background was selling latex gloves to dentists. They sourced from Mexico, marked them up, and built a real business. They weren't glove manufacturers. They were middlemen who understood pricing and had the nerve to go get a customer before they had ironclad supply locked down.

The Cold Outreach Side of a Physical Product Business

Once you've validated the offer - once you know what price points work and what objections you'll hit - then you can start scaling outreach.

The guy I was coaching came in already using Apollo to pull leads and Apify to run the scrape, then enriching with phone numbers for cold calling. That's a solid workflow. I told him I use ScraperCity to do the same thing, because it has the Apollo search built right in - you don't have to juggle between your Apollo account and a separate scraper tool. But the underlying process is basically identical: build the search, scrape the contacts, verify the emails, enrich with phone numbers where available.

The number that matters at minimum scale is 18,000 verified contacts a month for cold email. That sounds like a lot. It isn't. Apollo's data is somewhere between 30-40% garbage - outdated info, phantom companies, wrong contacts. So when I say 18,000 verified, I mean after you've run the raw list through a verification tool like NeverBounce. NeverBounce is owned by ZoomInfo - public company, the biggest lead gen platform on earth - and they let you verify against their database for a fraction of a penny per contact. Worth every cent. You'll throw out roughly half your raw Apollo pull, so if you need 18,000 clean contacts, you're building a raw search with at least 300,000 results to have enough runway for a full year of outreach.

For this kind of B2B physical product sale - selling boxes to manufacturers and farmers - cold calling is equally valid. The guy had been doing real estate phone sales and was comfortable on the phone. That's a massive asset. For a B2B product with a short, simple pitch, cold calling can work fast. You just have to get good at answering the one question that matters on the first call: Who's handling your packaging needs? Get to that person, make your pitch, see what happens.

For phone number enrichment on leads that don't have numbers in Apollo, the workflow I'd follow is to run the contact data through Clay and use their data enrichment flows. Clay has about twenty different ways to enrich phone numbers. It costs credits but it's the cleanest way to do it at scale.

For email infrastructure, we're not sending from Google or Outlook anymore. Those platforms have been hammered by spam complaints. We use custom-hosted inboxes on AWS or Azure - basically building our own mailboxes outside of the big consumer email ecosystems. It takes about two weeks to warm up domains before you can start sending volume. Which means if you're starting today, kick off the infrastructure setup immediately, because those two weeks are dead time if you wait. Use that window to build your lead list, write your scripts, put up a basic landing page. By the time the domains are warm, you should be ready to slide in your leads and start sending. Tools like Smartlead or Instantly are what we use for the actual send layer.

If you want the full cold email script framework we use to open conversations at scale, grab the Top 5 Cold Email Scripts - those are the actual templates, not generic advice. And if you're building this from scratch and want a complete lead generation strategy, the Best Lead Strategy Guide walks through the whole sourcing-to-outreach pipeline.

Don't Niche-Hop. Bang Your Head Against the Wall.

There's a version of this story where the guy tests packaging for six weeks, decides it's too hard to source, and pivots to something else. Then does the same thing. Then does it again. I see this constantly.

I used to teach a niche-testing framework - try a few things, see what sticks, move on if it doesn't. I still think there's truth in that for the very beginning. But once you've done enough research to know there's a real market? Once you can look at a competitor's website and confirm that someone is making money at this? Now it's not about testing anymore. Now it's about commitment.

The packaging market is growing. People aren't going to stop buying boxes. That's not the question. The question is just whether you'll stay in it long enough to crack the code on your pitch, your outreach, and your sourcing. Every business I've built that worked required a period of just banging my head against the wall until something broke open. That's not a metaphor. It's literally just: keep going, keep adjusting, stop looking for exits.

The most dangerous thing about having access to a lot of tools and a lot of strategies is that it makes it easy to stay busy without making progress. The n8n automations, the Clay enrichment flows, the LinkedIn sequences - none of that matters if you don't have an offer validated and a list being worked. Build the website. Write the outreach. Make the calls. The rest is optimization for later.

The Alter Ego Is the Shortcut

I want to come back to where we started, because I think it illustrates something broader than just Alibaba sourcing.

The willingness to do something slightly unconventional - something that most of your competitors would never think to do, or would feel too awkward doing - that's where the real margin lives. Not in having a better product. Not in having a more sophisticated tech stack. In being willing to pretend to be Chinese on Alibaba to get the actual price instead of the foreigner price.

That's an edge that costs nothing. It just requires a little creativity and zero embarrassment.

Most people will read this and think it's too weird. Those people will keep paying the markup. The ones who'll try it - who'll spin up a fake Mandarin persona in Claude and send their first price inquiry as Zhang Wei from Shenzhen - will quietly get better pricing than everyone else in their market for as long as this asymmetry exists.

That's the whole business, honestly. Finding the asymmetries, exploiting them before the market closes them, and moving to the next one.

If you want to go deeper on the outreach side of this kind of business - how to write the cold emails, how to structure your sequences, how to handle the sales calls once meetings start coming in - Galadon Gold is where I work through this live with people. We've got a cold email coach, a cold calling coach, an offer creation coach, and group calls every week where real businesses are solving exactly these problems. That's where the iteration happens fast.

And if you're at the stage where you're building your first lead list and want to understand the infrastructure: start with the 7-Figure Agency Blueprint and work through the outreach stack section first. It'll save you a few weeks of figuring out what to prioritize.

Now go find your 300,000 contacts. And maybe think about what name you'd use if you were Chinese.