Sourcing Guides

Key takeaways Importing from China is not one skill. It is nine decisions in a fixed order — and each one must produce a document, or it didn’t happen. The order is the risk control: verification before deposit, spec before quote comparison, inspection before balance, documents before money. Most first-order losses are decided at step […]

Key takeaways Every scam I have watched in nine years on the China side had one engine: money moving faster than documents. None of them were clever. All of them were fast. The seven patterns: the changed bank account, the vanishing deposit, the golden sample, the borrowed certificate, the factory that isn’t, the below-cost price,

Key takeaways Factories don’t hate small buyers. Their lines are priced for volume, so at carton quantities you are buying leftover capacity or a trader’s consolidation — not factory time. Four paths actually work under roughly $10k: stock and ready-to-ship lots, consolidation traders, 1688-direct with a helper layer, and the sample-to-scale ladder. At small quantities,

Key takeaways You would never wire a deposit to an unverified factory. Apply the same discipline to the person holding your entire supply chain: vet your agent like your agent vets factories. The agent equivalent of a sample order is a paid test task: one supplier vetted, one registry file, one dated memo, small flat

Key takeaways Alibaba is a directory with a payment rail, not a verifier. The verification work exists on every order — the only question is who performs it. DIY is genuinely enough for catalog products, survivable stakes, and buyers with time to run the checks. Sometimes the honest answer is “you don’t need an agent.”

Key takeaways There are four fee models in China sourcing: commission on order value, flat project fee, hourly — and the hidden one: a factory kickback baked into your unit price. The most expensive agent you will ever hire is the one who charges you nothing, because then the factory is the client and your

Key takeaways Every public “china wholesale suppliers list” is one of three things: paid placement, stale data, or a lead-capture form. None of them has a verification column. A real supplier list is per-product, not per-category. It lives in a spreadsheet, and it has a “rejected” column — a list without rejections is a brochure.

Key takeaways Three quotes for the same Bluetooth speaker landed on my comparison sheet last month. Same spec, same 1,000-piece target quantity. One of the three companies had no factory at all. And it wasn’t the most expensive quote — it was the cheapest. That is the thing nobody tells first-time importers: the middleman’s trap

Key takeaways You sent an RFQ to ten factories on Alibaba. Five replied. You open your spreadsheet, sort the “Unit Price” column from lowest to highest, and highlight the winner. Stop. That is exactly how first-time importers lose their money. A unit price is just one line item in a much larger supply chain. If

Key takeaways When overseas buyers start looking for help in China, they type four different phrases into Google: china sourcing agent, china purchasing agent, china buying agent, and china procurement agent. Most buyers think they are searching for the same thing. Most agents are happy to let them think that. But on the ground, these