What is the most questions most asked about buying from china?

A frequently asked question by Chinese suppliers when you are inquiring about the price is “What’s your order quantity?”, “How many pieces do you want?”

Annoying but understandable. The annoying part was they might look anxiously at you and told you one of their customers ordered thousands of pieces or a large container last week, and then they were searching the closet for the bill to show you. Later, they took put the calculator and gave you a price and said the price was the same they gave to the BIG customer last week…

I was told N+1 times!

Be it true or not, you have to answer the question “how many pieces do you want” to get a better price. Then how to answer it in a right way？

I used to tell them, “My order quantity depends on your price. If the price is good, we’ll order more. However, for the first-time cooperation, we’ll start with a small trial order to test quality of the goods and the market. If everything works great, we’ll increase the order quantity and  hopefully order every month. We have clients from all around the world and containers shipped every week. Our export value per year…”

Any good ideas to answer this question?