The biggest of your considerations should be:

What recourse will you have if you find as often is the case if importing that it is a fake, some of the landed stock has faults, the wrong colour is sent, your size 12 is very different to their size 12 etc?

Buyer beware. This is why apart from supporting the British economy and loving the quality we can achieve, we like dealing with British suppliers who are therefore within kicking distance and governed by laws we are able to have enforced. Personally we have found the biggest issue with poor stock was from some US sellers who are quick to sell their China made wares to you but can't answer email or phone once you have their dodgy stock and you are left wondering how these people can sleep at night. That's when you write on their brand Facebook wall and suddenly the bones have no longer fallen out of their fingers and they get in contact with you! Another good reason to pay for stock with your personal credit card so you can dispute payment as a way to resolve your issues but do document and photograph everything.  

As for the Far East I have heard so many horror stories about their ideas of what will suffice in their interpretation for your order like substituting the wrong colour blue motorcycle parts. Italian orders are more often than not like putting your hand in the sawdust for a prize you were not expecting, that is if they have not sold your goods to someone who happened to arrive in their factory with cash before they even left the building. These aren't unlucky rare incidents but part and parcel of doing business today. Every business, large or small, young or old, is having supplier headaches unless they are extremely fortunate. 

If you want an easy life, do not become an etailer. Web nuances and unexpected digital world surprises can bite you in the proverbial just as much as the supply issues - like the time our website grew so successful in traffic/sales so fast that our web hosting company took down our site without giving any notice, because we were using too much of the server bandwidth. Then they held us to ransom and it was all very unpleasant. Meanwhile if Google bot comes along and your site is down you could lose those hard earned rankings. Regardless of a few extra grey hairs we love ecommerce but make no mistake that it is not an easy ride.

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