From discovery to delivery,
in three steps.

Discover & Inquire

Sourcing starts with finding the right kind of factory, not the cheapest one. Our Categories page is organised by what a B2B buyer actually shops for — furniture, display & acrylic, electronics, personal care — not by the marketing categories factories like to claim. Each verified factory profile carries an audit date, capacity numbers, certifications, and the name of the person you will actually speak to. Browse first; you do not need an account to look around.

Submit a single inquiry

When you find a factory worth a conversation, submit one inquiry through the Request a Quote form. The form asks for the basics — product, target volume, destination market, ideal landed price, decision timeline — because that is the information a factory needs to give you a real number rather than a placeholder. If you are exploring two or three factories in the same category, submit one inquiry per factory; we do not route a single inquiry across competing workshops, because that produces lazy quotes from everyone involved.

Routing and the 48-hour rule

Inquiries land on our Foshan operations team within ten minutes of submission. A human reads the brief, picks up the phone or WeChat, and starts the conversation with the factory the same afternoon (China time). You receive the first substantive response — typically a clarification email followed by a quote or a sample request — within forty-eight hours. If we cannot serve your inquiry — because the volume is below the factory's MOQ, because the destination needs a certification the factory does not hold, or because the timeline is genuinely impossible — we tell you the same day and explain why, rather than running you in circles for two weeks.

What you get at this stage

• Direct contact information for the factory's actual sales and engineering point of contact
• A first-pass quote with line items broken out (unit cost, tooling, sampling, packing, freight)
• The factory's recent audit notes if you ask — we do not gate our own audit reports behind a paywall
• An honest answer on lead time, including the inevitable revision window

Quote & Sample

A first-pass quote is a conversation starter, not a contract. The next two weeks are where the program actually gets defined: tightening specifications, ordering samples, and either confirming the factory is the right partner or moving on without burning the relationship. We stay involved through this phase because most early-stage misunderstandings happen here, and they are far cheaper to fix before mould tools are cut than after.

Quotes go direct, not via us

The factory's quote arrives in your inbox with the factory's letterhead, the factory's sales person on copy, and the factory's price — not a marked-up version routed through a middleman. We do not add a service fee on the quote, and we do not take a commission on the eventual order. Our revenue comes from the workshop subscription that funds the platform, not from your invoice. The practical effect is that the price you see in week two is the price you pay in week six.

Paid samples with traceability

We strongly recommend ordering paid samples before any production commitment. A free sample tells you what the factory wants you to think it can do; a paid sample, executed against your written specification with your packaging brief, tells you what the factory will actually deliver under contract. Samples typically take seven to fourteen days plus international shipping; the factory ships with full traceability documentation (mould lot, fabric or material lot, batch certificate of analysis) so that any future production run can be compared back to the approved sample.

Optional: Foshan team on-site audit

For programs above a certain commercial size — typically a first order above ten thousand US dollars or any custom-OEM program with tooling investment — our Foshan team can walk the factory in person before you commit. This is included for buyers we work with regularly; for first-time programs we charge a small auditing fee that is credited back against the first order. The audit covers the production line for your specific category (not just the showroom), the documentation discipline (batch records, QC release certificates, traceability), and the bench depth of the engineering team that will execute your program.

What you get at this stage

• A firm, factory-direct quote with no platform markup
• One to three paid samples executed against your written specification
• An optional in-person audit by our Foshan operators (free for repeat buyers, fee-credited for new buyers)
• A written sourcing plan: the factory, the SKUs, the timeline, the milestones, the SLA on quality complaints

Order & Ship

Once samples are approved and the sourcing plan is signed, production starts. The third phase is where the work shifts from finding the right partner to running the program reliably — payments, quality control, export documentation, and the logistics chain from the factory floor to your door. We do this at scale across a hundred-plus factories every week, so the process is not improvised.

Hong Kong-incorporated invoicing

Orders are placed and invoiced via our Hong Kong entity, Qingxuan International Trading Ltd. (CR No. 79771658). Why this matters: you receive a Hong Kong invoice, payable to a Hong Kong DBS Bank account, in any of eleven currencies including USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, AUD, CAD and SGD. You do not have to navigate Chinese mainland banking, you do not have to deal with foreign exchange controls on the supplier side, and your finance team receives a clean Hong Kong-domiciled invoice that fits standard accounts payable workflows. We handle the upstream RMB payment to the factory ourselves.

Payment terms that work for B2B

Standard terms are 30% T/T deposit on order confirmation, 70% balance against shipping documents before the container loads. For larger annual blanket orders or first-time relationships above a certain threshold, we accept letters of credit (sight or deferred) through DBS. We do not require payment-on-order or pre-payment in full; if a factory quote demands 100% up-front, that is a red flag we will raise with you and either renegotiate or recommend a different factory.

Quality control and pre-shipment inspection

Our Foshan team conducts in-process and pre-shipment inspections for every order above a defined value threshold; for smaller orders we contract third-party QC firms (SGS, Bureau Veritas, or local equivalents) on your behalf. Inspection reports arrive in your inbox before the container loads, with photographs of the actual production lot, measurement data against the approved sample, and a clear pass / fail / conditional-pass disposition. You make the final ship decision; we never load a container that you have not signed off on.

Export documentation and consolidation

Export documentation — commercial invoice, packing list, certificate of origin, fumigation certificate where required, country-specific compliance documents — is produced from our Hong Kong office, not at the factory. If you are running a multi-SKU order across two or three of our factories, we consolidate the goods in our own warehousing in Shenzhen, Foshan, or Guangzhou before booking a single container. This typically saves you fifteen to thirty percent on freight versus shipping each factory's portion separately, and it gives you one point of contact on the logistics chain instead of three.

What you get at this stage

• Hong Kong-incorporated invoice in your local currency, payable to DBS Bank
• Standard 30/70 T/T or L/C payment terms (no factory pre-payment ambush)
• Pre-shipment inspection report with photos and a clear ship / hold disposition
• Full export documentation packet, multi-factory consolidation where applicable