The questions people ask before they work with China.

Start from the registry, not the listing. Every Chinese company has a public record — its business scope says whether it is licensed to manufacture, its registered address says whether it is a plant or an office, and its shareholders say who actually owns it. A supplier whose scope is trade (贸易) with no production licence is a middleman regardless of what the website shows. Then visit, or have someone you trust visit. The Supply Chain Check does exactly this for one supplier in ten working days.

Four sources, in order: the National Enterprise Credit Information system for registration, ownership and penalties; the court records for litigation and dishonest-executor listings; the customs registration for whether they have ever exported themselves; and a site visit for whether the address is a production line. Commercial databases such as 天眼查 and 企查查 pull these together in Chinese; the check translates and organises them for you.

For samples and small reorders, usually. For a product line your business depends on, the platforms cannot tell you who owns the factory, what they are licensed to make, what they were fined for last year, or what you should be paying. Gold badges and years-on-platform are paid for, not earned. Use the platform to find candidates, then verify the one you choose the way you would verify any company you are about to wire money to.

Most agents quote you 3–10% of the order. Many also take a commission from the factory that is built into your price and never disclosed. That is why factory-gate prices are so hard to get through an agent. SilkNet is paid by you alone, on a fee agreed before the deal starts, and never inside the price — which is also why factory owners keep picking up the phone.

An audit checks that a factory is what it says — capacity, certifications, working conditions, quality systems. Third-party audits (BSCI, SMETA, ISO) are useful for compliance and required by many retailers. They are less useful for price, ownership and the tier below, which is why the check adds a registry profile and a site visit to the audit picture rather than replacing it.

Get three written quotes from factory owners on the same specification, written in Chinese so every quote is on the same thing. If your price sits more than 10–15% above the middle quote and your supplier is a trader, you are paying for a layer. The check benchmarks up to three products this way.

30% deposit, 70% before shipment is the default and it puts all the risk on you. Better: milestone payments held in escrow and released against inspection and shipping documents. Established relationships move to 30/70 against copy of bill of lading, and eventually to open terms. Never pay 100% up front, and never pay a personal account.

Write the standard down before the first order — a specification, a golden sample, tolerances, packaging — and inspect against it every time, not just once. Pre-shipment inspection by an independent firm costs a few hundred dollars a container and prevents the classic second-order substitution. Tooling should be in your name on paper, so you can move if you must.

Minimum order quantity is the factory's way of covering setup. It is negotiable when you are a serious repeat buyer, when you accept a slightly higher unit price for the first run, or when the factory already makes the product for someone else. A trader's MOQ is often the factory's MOQ plus their margin for handling small orders.

EXW means you take the goods at the factory door and manage everything. FOB means the factory delivers to the port and you take it from there — the most common and usually the cleanest. DDP means the seller delivers to your door with duty paid; convenient, but the duty and freight are inside a price you cannot see. For anything beyond samples, FOB with your own forwarder keeps the costs visible.

Your landed cost is the factory price plus freight, plus the base duty for your product's classification, plus any additional tariffs applied to goods of Chinese origin, plus brokerage and inland delivery. The classification and the origin rules are where most of the damage — and most of the recoverable money — sit. Rates move; the method for rebuilding your cost line does not.

Sometimes. Often the answer is "China done right" — a direct factory relationship and a correct classification recover more than a move saves, without the two-year transition. "China plus one" keeps China for what it does best and adds a second country for tariff-exposed lines. A full move makes sense when the numbers say so with real quotes, not a slide. We price all three before recommending any.

Keeping your Chinese supply base while qualifying a second source in Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico or elsewhere for the products where tariffs or concentration risk bite hardest. Done well, the Chinese factory often helps set up the second plant. Done badly, you pay two sets of tooling and get one set of quality.

Yes, and it often is. Classification decides your base duty and which additional tariffs apply. A product classified under a broad heading by a busy broker can carry several points more duty than the correct one. A licensed broker's opinion and, for anything material, a binding ruling request make the saving defensible.

Less than most people expect and more than the ads say. Registration itself is inexpensive; the real costs are the registered address, the accounting and tax filings you must keep from month one, the capital you commit, and the licences your specific industry needs. The expensive mistake is the business scope — the Chinese wording of what your company may do — written wrong the first time.

A wholly foreign-owned enterprise gives you control and is the default for most operating businesses. A joint venture makes sense when the partner brings something you cannot buy — a licence, a distribution network, a factory — and when the agreement is written so that control, IP and exit are clear on day one. Most bad JVs were good ideas with bad paper.

Yes, before you announce anything. China is first-to-file: whoever registers the mark owns it, regardless of who used it first elsewhere. File the Latin mark and a Chinese-character mark, in the right classes, in your own company's name — never a distributor's. This is step one of every market-entry trail we run.

It depends entirely on what you sell and where. Food, beverage, cosmetics, medical devices, education and anything financial have their own approvals, and a restaurant needs a different set from a showroom. The right order matters as much as the list — some permits cannot be applied for until others are granted. We map them before money moves.

Yes, through cross-border e-commerce — goods ship from a bonded warehouse and the platform handles much of the compliance. It is the fastest way to test demand. It is not a substitute for trademarks, and it does not scale into general trade without an entity and a distributor. Many brands test on CBEC and enter properly once the numbers justify it.

Not by cold email. Western brands and OEMs take partners seriously when they arrive verified, under NDA, with a mandate that states clearly what exists, what seat is open and what a partner gets. SilkNet writes that mandate, finds and verifies counterparts in the target market, and puts both sides in one room in both languages. Your name is not shown until a serious party has signed.

A company with something real — a technology, a factory, a product, a company — and one open seat beside it for a partner on the other side of the border. We write the mandate, verify every party, and run the deal to signing on the Trail. The holder pays a fixed mandate fee plus a success fee at signing. Expressing interest costs a partner nothing.

Offer all three and let the workshop decide. A licence travels fastest and keeps your IP central; a supply agreement is the easiest for a Western brand to say yes to; a joint venture is the deepest and the slowest. Deciding the structure before meeting the partner usually means meeting the wrong partner.

None of the three. A consultant hands you a report. A sourcing agent quietly earns on the factory side. SilkNet is a trade house: paid by you alone, one fee agreed up front, responsible for the whole project — the rooms, the contracts, the factory, the cargo and the payment. And we run cross-border businesses of our own on the same network.

One supplier or one product line examined end to end and written up in ten working days: the supplier profiled from the registry, factory-gate quotes from three owners on your specification, the tier below, your landed cost rebuilt at today's rates, and the introductions that would change the number. The US$2,500 is credited in full against your first engagement with us, or refunded if the report does not earn its price. There is a sample report on the site.

Completely. Every engagement begins under NDA; your trail is visible only to the stakeholders you approve; we never publish client names, mandate holders or deal details. Suppliers we check never learn who asked.

Seriousness, not size. If it is a real project with a real budget behind it, we can help — and for a single supplier or product line, the check is built exactly for that. Marketplace reorders, dropshipping and lowest-quote shopping are better served elsewhere, and we will say so.

One fee, agreed with you before the deal starts. We are paid by you alone — never by the factory, never inside the price. On our largest programmes, that discipline returns over US$1M a year in procurement costs.

A senior partner reads every request and replies within one working day. Factory pricing on defined products typically comes back within days; the check in ten working days.

Free. Each visitor can draw six trails an hour. What it draws is the shape — steps and rooms by role, never a name. The names, the introductions and the deal itself are the work, and that starts when a partner reads what you sent.