What it costs
Checking a supplier and buying from one are different jobs, and pricing them the same way creates an incentive nobody benefits from. Checks are quoted per job. Sourcing is charged on the order or by the month. Below is how each is calculated, and the conditions around it.
Verification, inspection and audit work is quoted for the job in front of it, and the price does not move with the value of the goods. That is deliberate: a fee calculated as a share of what you spend would give us an interest in you spending more, which is not a useful incentive to have sitting behind a report that is supposed to tell you what we could not confirm.
USD 99
The registered entity, its unified social credit code, business scope and legal representative, whether the payee matches the party you are contracting with, and whether the registered address and the production address are the same place.
Per supplier. Desk verification of the records, so no site visit is involved and travel does not arise.
USD 99 / man-day
Sample-based inspection against your written specification and approved sample, with photographs, measurements and a finding log, plus the labelling and packaging checks your destination requires.
A full-time inspector, photographs, measurements, a finding log and the report are in the rate. Sample size and inspection level are agreed before the visit.
USD 199
Capability, quality controls, equipment and capacity against your product and volume, with working and site conditions observed and reported as seen. No report is issued under the name of any certification or social-compliance scheme.
Flat price for a basic audit: one day on site, photographs and a standard report. Wider scope is quoted at USD 99 per man-day.
A man-day rate is only useful if you can tell how many of them your job needs. These are the ordinary cases; anything unusual is quoted before it is booked.
Where the work is finding suppliers, running sampling rounds and carrying an order through production, it is charged in one of two ways. Which one fits depends on whether you buy in projects or continuously.
7–10% of order value
A single engagement covering everything between the order and delivery — supplier search, sampling rounds, commercial terms, production follow-up, inspection and coordination. The checks priced above are included rather than billed again on top. The rate is set by order value, so the band is known before work starts rather than negotiated afterwards.
USD 300–1,000 per month
For buyers with continuous requirements rather than discrete projects. A fixed monthly cost regardless of how many orders fall inside it, which suits a range you reorder rather than a one-off purchase.
Many agents quote one delivered figure with their fee inside it, and argue that what matters is the final number rather than the percentage. That argument is largely right. An agent charging less who negotiates badly costs you more than one charging more who negotiates well, and a buyer who optimises the fee instead of the total is optimising the wrong line.
The difficulty is that a single number cannot be checked. You cannot tell whether the factory price inside it was negotiated down, because you never see it, and there is no counterfactual against which to test the claim that it was. The question is not whether an agent is honest — most are — but whether you would be able to tell.
Our fee is a percentage too, and a percentage of order value carries the same awkward property in any model: it rises with the price. Two things are done about that here. Checks are priced per job so they do not move with what you spend. And you pay the factory directly, so you see the factory's price, can take that price to another factory, and can read our fee as its own line rather than inferring it.
If you are comparing an all-in quote against this one, three answers make them comparable: what the factory charges, what the agent charges, and what freight and storage cost. An agent who can give you all three is comparable to us and may well beat us. One who cannot may still be excellent — but when the price moves next year, you will not be able to see which part moved.
Stated here rather than discovered on an invoice. Where something falls outside our scope we will say so and, where we can, point you at who does it.
Most disputes about a quotation are not about the headline figure. They are about what was assumed to be included. These are ours, stated up front.
You pay the factory directly for the goods. We do not hold money for your order, so our fee and the factory's price stay two numbers you can see separately rather than one number with a margin buried inside it. It also means that if this arrangement ever ended, your supplier relationship and your money would both be exactly where they already are.
Quoted and settled in US dollars, by bank transfer (T/T), Payoneer, PayPal or XTransfer; invoice and payment details are set out in the written quotation. A standalone check is paid before it is booked; the amounts are small and it keeps a first engagement simple. On a full engagement the commission is halved: half when work starts, half when the pre-shipment inspection report is delivered and accepted. That is the same rule we tell buyers to apply to their own suppliers — release the balance against the result rather than against the calendar — and it would be strange to recommend it and not accept it. Orders below USD 5,000 are commissioned in full up front, because splitting a small fee costs both sides more in administration than it protects.
Our inspectors are based in Jinhua, Zhejiang. Nothing is added for travel within 100 km of there, which covers much of the Zhejiang manufacturing belt. Beyond it, travel is quoted separately before the visit is booked and never added afterwards — including on the flat-price audit, so that the figure you were quoted is the figure you were quoted.
No surcharge for work carried out on a Saturday or Sunday. Production schedules do not respect weekends and neither does our rate.
Whether it is an inspection or an audit, the report reaches you within 48 hours of the on-site work finishing. That is a commitment on our own work, which is the part we control. When the visit itself can happen depends on site access and on the supplier being ready, and if a finding needs re-checking before the report means anything we will tell you that rather than send something premature to hit a deadline.
A re-check after a failed inspection is a second visit and is charged as one. The rework itself is between you and the supplier; what we charge for is going back.
Need a figure for your own case?
