A sourcing agent works for the buyer. Not for the factory, not for the platform — for you. That single fact decides almost everything else about how the job is done.
What are China sourcing agents?
A China sourcing agent is a buying agent based in China who finds, vets and manages suppliers on behalf of an overseas importer. You send a product specification; the agent locates candidate factories, verifies they are what they claim to be, negotiates on your instructions, checks the goods before they ship, and moves them to your door.
The distinction that matters most is between an agent, a trading company and a broker. A trading company buys the goods and resells them to you — its margin is inside the unit price, and you rarely learn who made the product. A broker introduces you to a factory and steps away. An agent never takes ownership of your goods; it charges you a stated fee for the work and represents your interests in the room.
What that buys you in practice: lower landed cost than buying through a reseller, quality control performed by someone who can physically stand on the production floor, and one set of logistics decisions handled by people who make them every week.
Our sourcing services
The four services below are the core of the work. Most projects use all four; some clients start with inspection only, on suppliers they already have.
- Supplier identification and verification. Locating candidate factories for your category, then checking business licences, trade records and production capability — separating real manufacturers from trading companies presenting themselves as one.
- Price negotiation and sample management. Negotiating price and terms against local reference points, then ordering, labelling and shipping samples so you compare like with like before committing.
- Quality inspection and factory audits. On-site audits before you commit, and pre-shipment inspection with written reports before anything leaves the factory on your account.
- Export logistics and shipping coordination. Consolidation, freight booking, export documentation and customs clearance, through to the delivery point you nominate.
Why choose getchinasourcing.com
| Local market knowledge | A team on the ground across Yiwu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Foshan and Ningbo — the five markets most consumer categories actually move through. |
| Transparent pricing | The fee structure is explained before work starts. No charges appear later in the order that were not in the original quotation. |
| A dedicated account manager | One named person owns your project from first enquiry to delivery. You are not re-explaining the specification to a new inbox each week. |
| Track record | Over 500 completed sourcing projects and more than 4,000 clients served worldwide. |
How our China sourcing process works
- Submit your product requirements. Specifications, quantity, target price and delivery window. A tailored sourcing plan comes back within 24 hours.
- We source and vet suppliers. Supplier identification, background checks and factory audits, with a shortlist and the reasoning behind it.
- Negotiate and place orders. Price negotiation, sample approval, contract and order placement on your instructions.
- Quality control and shipping. Pre-shipment inspection with a written report, then export logistics and customs clearance.
The full stage-by-stage breakdown, including what you receive at each handover, is on the how it works page.
Industries we serve
Most of the volume we handle falls into a handful of categories. E-commerce sellers on Amazon and Shopify and wholesale distributors and importers make up the majority of clients; by product, the recurring categories are furniture, toys, auto parts, electronics, garments and general consumer goods.
Category matters more than it looks. Furniture is a Foshan problem; small commodities are a Yiwu problem; electronics is a Shenzhen problem. Knowing which market a product belongs to is half of sourcing it well.
Worked examples
Two examples from our own cost data, with the full working published so you can check every line:
| 2× | Packing decides an office chair. Same chair, same factory price: shipped assembled it lands at roughly twice what it costs flat packed, because ocean freight is billed on volume. See the numbers |
| 23% | Tariff outweighs freight on hand tools. Duty runs to roughly a quarter of the landed cost while ocean freight is under a tenth — the reverse of what most buyers spend their time on. See the numbers |
If you are still deciding whether a product is viable, we publish what a category costs to import — landed cost, not factory listing price.
One part of the job is easy to overlook until it stops a shipment: a Chinese export declaration has to be made by an entity holding import-export rights, and a domestic wholesale seller usually does not hold them. Buying from 1688 explains where that leaves a buyer working directly.
Not every order needs an agent. Do you actually need a sourcing agent? sets out the cases where you do not, and what a sourcing agent costs covers how fees are structured.
