United States
Most suppliers do not respond promptly to inquiries. Much time is wasted with replies that look like "Thank you for contacting me. How can I help you?" when my original contact contained all details needed to provide a quote.
Most vendors do not reply to requests for orders in the thousands of pieces; it's not like I want a quote on 7 pencils. Some vendors reply with utterly irrelevant quotes on entirely different products. Other vendors waste time with multiple successive emails thanking me for an inquiry and promising a quote "soon". What BS - if they don't know how much they want for product what are they doing in business in the first place? There are, being honest, a few good vendors that reply relatively quickly, their quotes are directly related to the inquiry, and they ship on time. Over the past few years I have spent around $50,000 on Chinese goods, but I still cringe everytime I need to order a new product. I simply do not have the time it takes to wade through the useless vendors to find the occasional good one. It may not be politically correct to say this but Chinese vendors just plain are not up to par when the customer is used to the continued and consistent excellent service of Japanese and American vendors. There is still a lot of third-world-ness about most of these companies. I have shifted some major product lines to Japan, despite higher costs, simply because it is too darn much trouble locating product on Alibaba.