Importing from China - Pre Shipment Inspections
Just a tip really as quite a few people are either (quite rightly) nervous about being scammed or have been scammed when buying from China.I have been buying from China for the last 16 years and had a pretty good record in terms of finding good suppliers to work with (in textiles and protective clothing) and not getting scammed. However it does seem to be getting worse right now in China with more and more scammers setting up websites and calling themselves traders / manufacturers.
As an importer you have to be more vigilant now than ever before. One of the newer safeguards I am looking to use with new suppliers in China is with pre shipment inspections services. I haven’t seen it mentioned here so I thought it was something worth bringing up.
If you are buying goods from China it could really pay to use one of the multitude of pre shipment inspection companies who will, on your behalf, go out to your supplier’s factories and inspect your order or the factory itself either before you pay for the goods or before the order ships.
This way you can flag up any quality or stock issues that you wouldn’t find until the goods had arrived in the UK or the US, long after you’d paid for them and perhaps long after the supplier has headed for the hills.
I have experience of using some of the UK based CE testing laboratories (like Satra and SGS) who offer this kind of service on textiles but if you Google “china pre shipment inspection services” you will find a whole host of companies who will do pretty much whatever you ask of them at usually a pretty reasonable cost.
I think you can have standard inspection work done for around £150 per shipment.
There are never any guarantees when importing and all you can do is minimize your risks as much as possible. However telling a supplier your inspection team will be there to inspect their factory / your goods will focus their minds quite quickly if they did have any desire to scam you.
In China you can only safeguard your cash before you send it, so you need to make sure you do all your checking of the supplier, his products and his quality before you send any money.
If you don’t and you do get scammed you have next to no chance of recovering your money in China through its legal systems.
So it may be an option worth investigating for many others wanting to import from China.
Hope this helps!
-Abertini
