We sell sourcing services, so treat this page with appropriate suspicion. We are writing it anyway, because the most expensive engagements for everyone involved are the ones where the client did not need us and found out three months in.
When you probably do not need one
- Small, simple, low-risk orders. A few hundred units of something standard, where a bad outcome is an annoyance rather than a business problem. Buy it directly, learn the process, and keep the fee.
- A supplier relationship that already works. If you have been buying from the same factory for two years and quality is stable, inserting a third party adds cost and a layer of translation to a system that is functioning.
- Commodity products with no specification to protect. Where any competent factory produces essentially the same thing and there is nothing to get wrong, most of what an agent controls does not apply.
- You already have someone on the ground. A partner, an employee, a long-standing contact in China who can visit factories. That is the substance of the service. You have it.
When an agent earns the fee
The value is not "finding suppliers". Suppliers are easy to find; the internet is full of them. The value is in the parts that require someone physically present, professionally sceptical, and accountable to you rather than to the factory.
- You cannot visit. The single strongest case. Nothing substitutes for someone standing in the building, and remote due diligence has a hard ceiling.
- The specification is complex or safety-critical. Where substitution of a material or component has consequences beyond a refund, and where catching it requires knowing what to look for.
- Multiple suppliers, one shipment. Consolidating several factories into one container is operational work that has to happen in China, on the ground.
- The order is large enough that a failure hurts. When the downside is a serious financial event rather than a bad week, paying a few percent to reduce that risk is straightforward arithmetic.
- You have been burned. Not a good reason on its own, but a common and legitimate one.
How to judge whether the fee makes sense
Compare the fee against the cost of the failure it is meant to prevent, not against the price of the goods. A percentage of order value tells you nothing about whether the service is worth buying.
Ask instead: what would a container of unsaleable product cost me, including the capital tied up, the channel commitments I would miss, and the time spent resolving it? If that number is large and the probability is not negligible, the arithmetic is usually clear. If a bad outcome means writing off a modest first order and trying again, it usually is not.
The middle option people forget
It is not a binary. You can buy direct and hire specific services where they matter: a factory audit before committing, or a pre-shipment inspection before releasing payment, without a full agency relationship.
For a lot of buyers this is the right answer, and we will say so. An inspection on an order you are otherwise managing yourself costs a fraction of a sourcing engagement and removes most of the catastrophic outcomes.
What to ask any agent before hiring them
- How are you paid, and by whom? The critical question. An agent taking an undisclosed commission from the factory is not working for you, whatever the contract says.
- Will you tell me which factory makes my goods? A refusal means you cannot verify anything independently, ever.
- Do you take ownership of the goods? If they buy and resell, you are not seeing the factory price and the margin is invisible.
- What happens when a shipment fails inspection? Listen for a specific process rather than reassurance.
Our own answers to those are on the pricing page, and the short version is: commission or flat fee agreed in advance, we name the factory, and we never take ownership of your goods.
Worth settling before you hire anyone: whether this particular order needs an agent at all. 1688 now runs a cross-border channel that a company outside China can pay through directly, which removes the language and payment obstacles for a filtered subset of the catalogue — though not the need for someone to act as exporter of record. How to buy from 1688 sets out where each route leaves you.
If the answer is yes, the next question is what it should cost. What a China sourcing agent costs works through commission, flat fees and where the margin hides on a low quote.
