Import from China: A Practical Sourcing Guide

The first import decision is made at a desk, not in a factory. Two questions kill most bad projects in an afternoon:

First products to avoid while you are learning: anything certification-heavy (children’s products, electronics, food contact in strict markets), anything fragile-heavy-cheap (freight eats it), anything with someone else’s brand or character on it.

Three honest routes:

A trading company is not a scam — it is a tool. For a small first order, a good trading company may be your only route under the factory’s MOQ. The sin is not using one; the sin is not knowing which one you have, because you will pay factory-direct expectations for middleman flexibility, or vice versa.

This is the step people skip because everything felt friendly. Friendliness is free; verification is nearly free.

Minimum before any deposit: pull the business license and actually read it — registered name matching the bank account, registered capital, business scope, address versus the “our factory” photos (here is how to read one). Check export record, ask for two references in your region, and treat certain patterns as stop signs: the factory tour that keeps moving, the MOQ that changes after commitment, the urgency that appears whenever you ask questions.

A supplier check exists as a service precisely because this step is cheap before the deposit and impossible after it. Verdicts come back in writing: proceed, renegotiate, or avoid.

Three quotes for the “same” product are usually three different products wearing the same photo. One assumes thinner material, one excludes export cartons, one leaves the mold fee “to be discussed”.

Force one basis before comparing: exact material spec, packing included or not, MOQ, lead time, payment terms, sample and tooling fees, validity period. Rebuilt on one basis, a 29% price gap has a habit of shrinking to 4% — and the “expensive” supplier sometimes turns out to be the honest one. This is its own discipline, and it is where negotiation actually starts: you negotiate the exposed assumptions, not the headline number.

Pay for samples. It filters unserious suppliers, and it filters unserious buyers — both filters work in your favor.

When the sample is right, it becomes the golden sample: sealed, photographed from every angle, referenced by name in your purchase order. From that moment, “quality” stops being an opinion and becomes a comparison. Every inspection later is measured against this object, not against memory. How to pay for, ship, and read samples like a buyer

Chat threads are where specifications go to die. Everything that matters lives in the purchase order: full spec with tolerances, packing and labeling requirements, the golden sample reference, dates with consequences, inspection rights before final payment, and the remedy if goods fail — rework, discount, or refund, agreed now, not negotiated later from a position of zero leverage.

Payment: 30/70 T/T is the standard rhythm — 30% deposit, 70% after your pre-shipment inspection passes, not after a photo of boxes. Pay the company account that matches the business license. A personal account “to save tax” is where recovery rights go to die. The clauses that actually protect you

Your leverage has a shape: it is highest the day before you pay the balance, and zero the day after. Schedule quality control where leverage still exists.

Three checkpoints earn their cost: a pre-production confirmation (right materials before the line starts), a during-production look for long runs (drift caught at 20% is a correction; at 100% it is a negotiation), and the non-negotiable one — pre-shipment inspection against the golden sample, with photos, measurements, and a written verdict: release, sort, rework, or hold. Problems found in China get fixed by the supplier; the same problems found in your warehouse get fixed by you, at your cost, with no one left to push.

More first shipments die at receiving than at sea. A barcode printed across a fold seam, care text machine-translated into nonsense, a missing origin mark, a poly bag below a marketplace’s thickness rule — each one is a two-minute fix before printing and a warehouse-wide relabeling job after.

Before plates are made, run a pre-print check: barcode scans at size and position, mandatory labels for your market present, translations read by a human, carton spec that survives a stacked container, inner counts matching the listing. Retail readiness is a checklist, not a vibe.

Incoterms in one honest paragraph: EXW means everything from the factory door is your problem — avoid it as a beginner. FOB is the workhorse: the supplier delivers export-cleared goods onto the vessel, your freight forwarder takes it from there. Suspiciously cheap DDP (“all-in, door delivered”) often works until the day it does not, and that day involves your goods and someone else’s customs declaration.

Mode is a math problem: sea for margin, rail as the middle option into Europe and the CIS, air and express for urgency that pays for itself. If your order spans several suppliers, consolidate — one plan, one container, one set of consistent documents, instead of four factories with four ideas of “ready”.

You will need a freight forwarder and a customs broker in your own country. Neither is expensive. Both are cheaper than guessing.

The only unit price that matters is the one after everything:

Landed cost = factory price + inland haulage + your share of freight + duty + import VAT/GST + port and broker fees + last-mile delivery + a 2–3% defect allowance.

Run it before the deposit, not after the container. A $2.10 product that lands at $3.40 against a $9.99 retail is a business; the same product against $5.99 is a hobby with paperwork.