general sourcing / Buying guide
How we check a supplier before you pay
Every order goes through the same four checks before your money reaches a seller, and a fifth after the goods arrive in our warehouse but before they leave China.
The checks are listed here in full so you can ask us to skip any of them, or ask another agent whether they do them at all.
In this guide
Before the order
- Trading history: years active, transaction volume, and repeat-purchase rate. A seller with volume but no repeat buyers is a warning.
- Factory or trading company: asked directly, then cross-checked against whether they can answer process questions about their own product.
- Specification in writing: material, dimensions, weight, packaging and quantity per carton, confirmed in the message thread before payment.
- Price sanity: compared against other listings for the same item. A large negative outlier is a different item, not a bargain.
After arrival, before shipping
Goods are photographed on arrival at the warehouse — quantity, condition, and the specifics you asked us to confirm. Anything that does not match the written specification is raised with you before it ships, while it is still in China and still returnable to the seller.
This is the only point in the process where a mistake is cheap to fix. After export, returning goods to a Chinese seller is almost never economic.
What we will not do
- Buy goods carrying a Western brand mark or logo.
- Declare a value other than the transaction value on export paperwork.
- Ship restricted goods by a route that prohibits them.
Questions & answers
Common questions
- Do you visit factories?
- For stock-goods orders, no — the goods are inspected at our warehouse. For custom production programmes, a factory visit can be arranged and is quoted separately.
- What if the goods are wrong?
- If it is caught at the warehouse, we raise it with the seller while the goods are still in China. What is recoverable depends on the seller, which is why the pre-order checks matter more than the post-arrival ones.
Your next step
Have a link you want checked?
Send a 1688 or Taobao product link and you get back the specification in English, the supplier check, and the landed cost to your country before you commit to anything.
Get a quote