When you start importing from 1688, almost everyone hits the same fork: should I stock evergreen goods or trend products? The answer is not a binary choice. It is about understanding which one fits your current capital and how much downside you can actually absorb.
What evergreen goods are and why the cash flow works differently
Evergreen products are things people buy year-round, independent of viral videos or special seasons. Common phone accessories, basic kitchen tools, stationery, everyday pet supplies: these are items where weekly sales this month look roughly the same as last month.
The strength of evergreen is predictability. You can estimate weekly units sold, plan when to reorder, size a safety buffer, and project what cash flow looks like thirty days out. For a seller working with limited capital, that predictability matters more than the per-order margin, because running dry between import batches is a much worse outcome than a modestly thin margin on a stable product.
The weakness is that margins are usually not exciting. Because demand is steady and 1688 has many suppliers for these items, a lot of shops carry them, and prices have already been pressed down. You still earn, but you earn steady small margins across many orders rather than a big spike on one hot wave.
Trend products run on a completely different logic
Trend products sell fast for a short window, usually because a wave of videos or a cultural moment drives sudden demand. When the timing is right and the product is right, margins can be strong because few sellers are in yet and buyers are not comparison-shopping. When the timing is off, stock arrives at your warehouse after the wave has passed and the price has already been crushed.
The core problem is that lead time does not match the trend lifecycle. A shipment from 1688 to Vietnam by sea typically takes around 18 to 30 days from when the factory hands goods to the consolidation warehouse in China. Add production time and consolidation, and the full window from placing the order to having stock in hand is often four to six weeks. A TikTok Shop trend frequently lives at peak heat for only two to four weeks. That means if you place an order after the trend is visibly hot, the stock often lands after the peak is already over.
Sellers who profit from trends are usually either people who spotted the product early (when only a handful of small videos existed) or people who already held inventory from a prior batch ordered for a different purpose. Both require experience and established supplier relationships. Neither is a realistic starting point for someone who just opened their first shop.
Limited capital doubles the risk of trend products
When capital is tight, a badly-timed trend order does not just lose money on that batch. It locks capital in unsellable inventory and leaves you without funds to reorder the products that are actually moving.
Suppose you have around VND 30 million in working capital. You put all of it into a trend item that looks hot. The money is gone, the stock takes four weeks to arrive. During those four weeks your shop has nothing to sell and no cash to do anything else. When stock finally lands, if the trend has already cooled, you sell slowly at a lower price, cash trickles back, and capital sits idle for more weeks.
An evergreen product in the same scenario works the other way. You import, stock arrives, sales run steadily, cash comes back, and you reorder. The cycle, even with a smaller per-order margin, compounds faster because the capital is never sitting still.
What a balanced catalog looks like at different capital levels
There is no single ratio that works for everyone, but a practical framework looks like this:
- Capital below roughly VND 50 million: Put 80 to 90 percent into evergreen. The rest, if you want to test a trend product, should only be an amount that can sit frozen without disrupting your next reorder. At this stage the goal is learning while keeping capital intact, not maximizing margin percentage.
- Capital between roughly VND 50 million and VND 200 million: More flexibility. Evergreen still forms the base that keeps cash flowing, but a portion can go toward a trend product if you are reading demand signals early and have a chance of entering before the crowd. A 70/30 or 60/40 split leaning toward evergreen is typical at this stage.
- Larger capital, accumulated experience: You can push more toward trends if you have suppliers who can ship quickly or if you can place small test quantities before a wave fully breaks. Even so, evergreen remains the cash-flow spine of the catalog.
A common confusion: seasonal goods are not the same as trend goods
Many sellers treat seasonal goods like trend products. They are not the same.
Seasonal goods have demand that follows a fixed calendar: fans before summer, mid-autumn festival items, warm clothing before winter. That demand is predictable, repeats each year, and most importantly, you know how far in advance to order. Seasonal goods behave more like evergreen in the sense that you can plan for them. The difference is that demand concentrates in a window rather than spreading evenly across the year.
Trend goods are different: demand appears suddenly without a calendar signal, and it also disappears suddenly. There is no schedule to plan around. You can only react quickly or predict early. You cannot plan for it the same way you plan for seasons.
Getting this straight matters because sellers who confuse the two tend to skip good seasonal opportunities (assuming they are as risky as trends) or enter trend products as if they are as reliable as seasonal ones.
Signals that a trend product is nearing the end of its window
If you are watching a product and see the following, that is the time to be cautious, not to accelerate:
- The number of shops selling it rises sharply over one to two weeks. When many people spot the trend simultaneously and all import at once, supply is about to exceed demand.
- Selling prices on the platform start dropping. Shops are clearing stock. If you import now, by the time goods arrive the price floor will be lower than your calculation.
- Fresh video content about the product slows down. Creators on TikTok have moved on to something else.
- Suppliers on 1688 suddenly have large inventory available for immediate shipping. Usually that means they over-produced and are also trying to clear.
One of the more expensive lessons with trend products is importing after seeing top shops posting high sales numbers, without recognizing that peak sales often occur right before the wave starts pulling back.
Bottom line
Evergreen products keep cash flowing and keep the shop running. Trend products create windows for stronger margins but require entering at the right moment and having enough buffer to absorb a miss. For new sellers or anyone with constrained capital, build the base on evergreen first, practice reading trend signals in parallel, and only commit capital to a trend product when that portion can be wrong without disrupting the whole catalog's cycle.