There is a precise moment in every first import when you stop. The quotation has arrived, the photographs look good, your contact replies quickly and well. All that remains is to wire the deposit — thirty percent, sometimes more — to a company you have never seen, in a country you have never set foot in.
Three tools circulate as reassurance at that moment: 1688, Pinduoduo and QCC. Two of them are useful. The third is widely misunderstood, and that misunderstanding is expensive.
We are based in China, in Foshan, and we visit factories ourselves on behalf of our clients. Here is what these tools genuinely allow you to check — and, more importantly, what they do not.
1688: a price benchmark, provided you know what it leaves out
1688 is China’s domestic marketplace. It is where Chinese businesses buy from each other, in yuan, for delivery inside China. Comparing your supplier’s quotation against it is a sound reflex: it gives you an order of magnitude nobody will volunteer.
A wide gap deserves a question. But a gap is not proof of dishonesty, and this is where many buyers go wrong.
A 1688 price does not include:
- export packing, which is a different thing entirely from domestic delivery packaging;
- inland transport to the port and terminal handling;
- the export licence, which not every seller holds;
- the fapiao, China’s official tax invoice, which a purely domestic seller will not issue — and without which certain operations become impossible.
Add to this that a large share of 1688 sellers are themselves resellers, not factories. The price you are reading may already contain an intermediary’s margin.
So 1688 tells you whether the order of magnitude is plausible. It does not tell you whether your supplier is overcharging you.
Pinduoduo: the mistake not to make
You will often read that Pinduoduo reveals “the real cost of the product, without export margins.” That is wrong, and it is the most damaging of the three pieces of advice.
Pinduoduo is a consumer retail platform. Its prices are heavily subsidised, and the very cheap items you find there are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, lighter versions: thinner material, simplified finishing, no export packaging, no certification.
Comparing a Pinduoduo retail price to a wholesale export quotation means comparing two different things. A lower price on Pinduoduo proves nothing — most of the time, it is simply not the same product.
We have watched buyers break off a perfectly sound relationship with a serious supplier on the strength of that comparison. They then paid far more, in time and in money, rebuilding what they had destroyed.
QCC: confirming the company actually exists
This is the best of the three. QCC — along with Tianyancha and Aiqicha — gives access to the official registration record of Chinese companies: legal name, legal representative, date of incorporation, shareholders, litigation, abnormal operation flags.
A company absent from these registers does not exist. That is grounds to stop immediately.
But three things are almost always missing from the advice you will read.
The registered capital shown is subscribed capital, not paid-up capital. A company can declare ten million yuan without having paid in a single cent. That figure does not measure your counterpart’s financial strength, and relying on it gives false confidence.
The declared business scope matters more than the capital. Check that manufacturing of your product category actually appears in it, and that the company holds an import-export licence. A company whose registered scope mentions only “wholesale trade” is not a factory, whatever it claims.
Finally, the official source is free. QCC aggregates data from China’s National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System, openly available at gsxt.gov.cn. It is in Chinese only, which explains the success of the paid services.
The check nobody mentions — the one that protects your money
The three tools above deal with price and existence. The check that actually prevents you from losing your deposit lies elsewhere, and it is remarkably simple.
The name on the contract, the name in the Chinese company register, and the beneficiary of the bank transfer must be one and the same entity.
This is where almost every fraud we encounter takes place. The quotation arrives under the name of a perfectly real, verifiable company. Then the payment instruction names an individual, or a shell company registered in Hong Kong, “for currency reasons” or “because the company account is being renewed.”
There is no good reason for this. A serious Chinese factory is paid into the account of the entity that signs the contract.
Check all three names. If they differ, stop and ask for a written explanation before transferring anything.
What these tools will never do
Taken together, 1688, Pinduoduo and QCC tell you whether you are paying a plausible price and whether your counterpart legally exists.
They will not tell you:
- whether that factory can make your product to your quality standard;
- whether production will resemble the sample you approved;
- whether the goods will actually be loaded into the container;
- whether your destination country’s regulatory requirements are met — and that is often where the real bill arrives.
None of this can be read on a screen. It is verified with a physical sample, a visit to the site, and an inspection of the goods before shipment.
That is precisely our work. We are in China, we go to the factory, we film, and we report back.
Going further
Our product catalogues are available online, and we send a twenty-page extract to anyone who asks: investworldlimited.com/en/catalogue-previews
If you have a specific project and want to know whether it stands up before committing anything, write to us. That first conversation costs nothing.
See also: our product sourcing service and the frequently asked questions.