China Sourcing Company — Your Import Export Partner in China

It stands between you and the factory and takes on the parts of an import you cannot do from another country. In practice that means identifying manufacturers that genuinely make the product rather than trading offices that resell it, negotiating in Mandarin against local price expectations, approving samples, inspecting the goods before they are paid for in full, and moving the shipment through export and import customs. The test of one is not whether it can find a supplier — anyone can send an enquiry through a B2B directory — but whether it is standing in the factory when the goods are packed.

Ask three questions and the field narrows quickly. First, do they have their own staff in China, or do they forward your enquiry to someone else and add a margin? Second, who employs the inspector — an agent paid by the factory has no reason to fail a batch. Third, will they show you the manufacturer's name, or does the relationship depend on you never learning it? An agent that cannot answer those plainly is a broker, and a broker's interests are not yours when something goes wrong.

Price is the one people expect and the smallest in practice. The real gains are that the specification is agreed before production instead of argued after arrival, that a defective batch is found while it is still the supplier's property and still their cost to rework, and that one shipment can be consolidated from several factories instead of paying freight and handling four times. Add the paperwork: an export declaration filed wrongly in China delays the vessel, and an import declaration filed wrongly at your end accrues storage while it is corrected.

For a first order, the right partner is the one that reduces the number of ways it can go wrong, not the one quoting lowest. Look for staff employed in China rather than a referral chain, an inspection you pay for rather than one the factory arranges, a landed quotation instead of a factory price you then have to freight yourself, and someone who will handle the customs entry at your end. Cheapest and safest are rarely the same offer on a first shipment, and the gap between them is usually smaller than one rejected batch.

A freight forwarder moves goods you have already bought. A sourcing company decides what you buy and from whom, then moves it. Using two separate firms is workable but leaves a seam: when an inspection fails, the forwarder is not involved, and when a shipment is delayed, the sourcing agent has no leverage over the carrier. We do both, which mostly matters on the day something has gone wrong.

We quote landed, so the number you see is the number you pay. What we will not do is refuse to say who made the goods. A sourcing arrangement that depends on the buyer never meeting the manufacturer is a fragile one, and it tends to end badly for the buyer rather than the agent.

The factory sets its minimum, not us, and it varies enormously — a stock item may ship in dozens while anything needing a mould or a custom colour will not. Tell us the quantity you actually want and we will come back with what is achievable at it, including whether a similar existing product avoids a tooling charge that a first order rarely justifies.

Our catalogue runs to over a million listed products across more than 500 categories, and it is a demonstration of range rather than stock we hold — we source to your specification. The strongest areas are consumer electronics and accessories, hardware and tools, lighting, houseware and kitchen, furniture, textiles and apparel, packaging, and machinery parts. If a product exists in volume in China, the constraint is usually your quantity rather than our access to it.