How to import from China: a first-timer's playbook

How to import from China looks simple on a spreadsheet and gets complicated the moment a real factory and a real wire transfer are involved. Importing from China is less about finding a supplier, since anyone can find a supplier, and more about telling the maker from the middleman and the true price from the foreigner price, then judging whether a product travels well or quietly loses money in freight. This is the order I work through it, and the parts that catch first-timers.

How to import from China starts with the product

The most expensive mistake in a China import business happens before any supplier is contacted: choosing the wrong product. China can make almost any physical good, so the constraint is never supply. It is whether the thing earns a margin after landed cost, ships without eating the profit, and is not already sold by ten other people at the bottom of a marketplace. Small and light beats bulky and cheap. Something you can brand or bundle beats a bare commodity. I wrote a longer breakdown of how I screen a shortlist in the guide on what products to import from China, and it is worth reading before you fall for a low quote.

Find a factory, not a trading company

The distinction that decides your price is simple: a factory makes the goods, a trading company buys from that factory and resells to you at a markup. Both will call themselves manufacturers. Both will send a polished sales rep. The difference shows up in export records, the business licence and its scope, and the questions a trader simply cannot answer about their own production line. On Alibaba you can filter for verified suppliers and read trade history, and at the Canton Fair in Pazhou, Guangzhou you can meet dozens of real makers in a few days each spring and autumn. Online, 1688 and Taobao carry almost the entire country’s output, often cheaper than any English-facing site, but neither has an English checkout and neither ships overseas, so most buyers route those orders through a buying agent.

Telling the two apart from your desk is hard. Telling them apart on the factory floor is easy, and it is most of why our product sourcing service exists.

Sample before you believe the listing

Photos hide thin plastic, loose stitching, and a finish that scuffs within a week. Always buy a sample, ideally from two or three candidates, and pay for it (a supplier who waives the sample fee is sometimes selling you a golden sample that the bulk run will never match). Hold it, stress it, wash it, drop it. A sample costs you a small fee and a week. A bad first order costs you the whole run plus the freight to ship junk across an ocean. If you cannot fly in to collect and check samples yourself, having someone buy, inspect, and forward them is a standard part of sourcing work.

Negotiate MOQ, price, and terms

Minimum order quantity (MOQ) is the lever new importers underestimate. A great product with a 5,000-unit MOQ is a cash-flow problem, not an opportunity. Ask about it early, ask about any tooling or mould fee for custom work, and ask whether a trial order at a lower quantity is possible for the first run. On price, the first number you hear is rarely the real one, and it tends to climb when the buyer reads as a foreigner who flew in for one deal. Negotiating in Mandarin, in the back office, gets a different price than negotiating in English over email. Get MOQ, unit price, lead time, and the spec written down together, because a verbal yes on a factory floor evaporates by the time the invoice arrives.

Sort payment and shipping

For a new supplier, 30 percent deposit and 70 percent balance before shipment is the normal structure. Pay by bank transfer to the company account, never a personal one, and use Alibaba Trade Assurance on early orders for a layer of recourse. Do not pay everything up front to a factory you have never worked with.

The factory price is usually FOB (free on board), meaning the goods sit on the ship at a China port and nothing more, which is exactly where a cheap quote turns into an expensive surprise. Your real number is landed cost: FOB plus freight, insurance, duty, customs and port fees, and delivery at the other end. Work this out per unit before you commit, because a product with a fat FOB margin can land at a loss. Sea freight is cheap and slow, air freight is fast and brutal on anything heavy, so weight and volume quietly decide which one you are stuck with.

What changes once you are standing in the factory

Everything gets more honest in person. You see the line, the materials, the housekeeping, and whether the operation matches the website. Prices move when the supplier knows you can walk to the next stand. And the language barrier stops being an inconvenience and becomes the whole game: the real terms, the quiet caveats, and the price a Chinese buyer would pay all live in Mandarin, in conversations you are not part of if you only have English. This is where a Chinese-English interpreter on the floor earns back their fee several times over, and where doing the legwork for you, before and after you fly home, is the point of our sourcing service. The deals that go wrong are rarely the ones that fall apart at the table. They are the ones that quietly stall after you leave, which is exactly the part I keep an eye on once you are back home.