Most import projects run in the same order. Find the supplier, agree a unit price, place the order, then ask a forwarder what it costs to ship. By the time that last question gets asked, three things are already locked: where the goods start, how they are packed, and how many there are. Those three settle most of the freight bill.
Two factories can quote the same unit price and land at costs that are nowhere near each other, because one sits ninety minutes from a container terminal and the other is a long drive inland. Two suppliers making the same product can differ by a wide margin in shipped volume, purely because one packs in export cartons and the other packs the way it ships to domestic customers. None of that appears on a quotation sheet. Here is what to ask while you still have room to choose.
What the freight side sees that a sourcing checklist doesn’t
A typical supplier evaluation covers price, sample quality, certifications, factory audit reports and how fast someone replies. All of it matters. None of it touches the four inputs a forwarder needs before anyone can price your shipment: the pickup address, the carton dimensions and gross weights, the total volume, and what the commodity actually is.
Those four are supplier attributes. They are decided by which company you buy from, not by which forwarder you hire afterwards. A forwarder can negotiate a rate. A forwarder cannot move a factory closer to a port, cannot shrink a carton, and cannot make a lithium cell fly on a passenger aircraft. If you are still at the stage of planning your first imports from China, an hour spent on these questions is worth more than a week of rate shopping later.
Where the factory sits decides your first invoice
Every export from China starts with a truck. Someone drives to the supplier’s door, loads, and hauls to a container yard, a warehouse or an airport. That leg is priced by distance, truck size and waiting time. On a container of high-value electronics it barely registers. On anything cheap and heavy it becomes a serious line item, and from a genuinely inland factory it can approach the cost of the ocean leg itself.
Distance is only half the question. The port a supplier sits near also decides which services you can book. Some terminals have direct weekly sailings to your destination; others feed a hub and your box waits for a second vessel, which adds days and adds one more chance to get rolled when space is tight. Ask early, because the answer may quietly favour one shortlisted supplier over another.
| Ask for this in writing | Why the freight side needs it | A weak answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| Full pickup address, including district and postcode | Inland haulage is quoted point to point. A province name cannot be priced | “Guangdong” or “our warehouse” |
| Which port or airport they normally export through | Tells you the trucking they are used to paying, and which sailing schedule you inherit | “Whichever is cheapest”, with no port named |
| Whether the address is the production site or an office | A trading office means the goods move twice, and the real factory may be much further out | An address in an office tower or a business park unit |
| Loading dock, forklift, and truck access at the site | No dock means hand loading or a smaller vehicle, and both are billable | “We can arrange”, with no detail |
Packing is a supplier capability, and it sets the number you are billed on
Ocean LCL is normally billed on the greater of cubic metres or metric tons. Air freight and courier services bill on the greater of actual weight and a volumetric figure derived from carton dimensions, using a divisor that is not the same across carriers or service levels. Whichever mode you end up using, the cartons your supplier chooses decide which of those numbers wins.
The common failure looks like this. A factory that has only ever sold domestically packs the way domestic parcel networks let it pack: retail boxes dropped into an oversized outer carton, plenty of air, odd dimensions that stow badly. The goods are fine. The volume is not. A repack at origin can recover most of it, but you have then paid for packing twice and lost a few days.
Before you commit, get these in writing: external dimensions and gross weight of the master carton as packed for export, units per master carton, whether cartons are palletised or loose, and what the pallets or crates are made of. Solid wood packaging moving internationally is subject to treatment and marking rules under ISPM 15, so a supplier who improvises a wooden crate without heat-treated, stamped timber can create a quarantine problem at the far end. Confirm the current requirement for your destination with your forwarder rather than assuming.
One more thing worth settling at this stage: ask whether the factory can apply your shipping marks and any required country-of-origin marking before the cartons are sealed. Marking at the factory is close to free. Marking after arrival means opening, relabelling and restacking in a destination warehouse, at destination labour rates.
Will this supplier’s cargo travel with anyone else’s?
If you are buying from more than one factory, or buying quantities that do not fill a container, your goods will be pooled with something. That only works if the supplier can behave like a party in a wider process rather than a shop that ships when it feels ready.
Three capabilities decide it. First, can they deliver to a nominated address in China, typically a consolidation warehouse, on a date you set, and who pays that inland leg. Second, can they produce a commercial invoice and packing list that match the cartons exactly, with the same descriptions, quantities and values you will declare. Mismatched paperwork between suppliers is one of the most avoidable causes of a held container. Third, can they hold finished goods without pressuring you to ship, because in a multi-supplier order somebody always finishes early.
There is also the question of who legally exports the goods. In China, exporting in a company’s own name requires customs registration as a foreign trade operator, and plenty of small factories do not hold it. They export through an agent, which is normal and legal, but it means the exporter shown on the customs declaration is not the company you signed with. Ask who that entity will be. A supplier who can name it is telling you they have done this before. A supplier who cannot answer at all is telling you something too.
The minimum order freight allows is not the minimum on the quotation
Factory MOQ is a production number, set by tooling changeovers, material batches and the sales manager’s patience. There are two other minimums nobody puts in writing. Below a certain volume, freight per unit is heavy enough that the landed cost stops working regardless of how good the unit price is. Above a different volume, a full container becomes cheaper in total than shipping the same goods LCL, even though you are buying more.
Both are arithmetic, and you can run them before you negotiate. Rough sequence:
- Get carton dimensions and gross weight per carton, packed for export.
- Convert to total CBM and total gross weight at two or three candidate order sizes. The CBM and volumetric weight calculators handle the conversions.
- Ask for LCL pricing at those volumes and a full-container price for the same lane, so you are comparing the same origin and the same destination door.
- Find the volume at which the container total drops below the LCL total. That crossover usually arrives before the container is physically full.
- Divide each freight total by units, add it to the unit price, and only then compare suppliers.
Density matters here more than most buyers expect. Dense, heavy goods reach a container’s payload ceiling long before they fill its cube, and destination road rules impose a second ceiling on what a single box can carry over the highway, which varies by country, state and equipment. If your product is heavy for its size, ask about weight limits before you decide between a 20ft and a 40ft container. Our overview of what shipping from China actually costs sets out how the pieces of a freight total fit together.
Some products narrow your carrier list before you pick a supplier
Certain attributes change which transport modes are even available, and they are attributes of the product, which means they are attributes of the supplier you choose. Lithium cells and batteries, whether loose, packed with equipment or installed in it, fall under dangerous goods rules and require documentation before anyone will accept them by air. Liquids, gels, aerosols, powders, magnets, and anything containing wood, bamboo or rattan all carry their own handling or quarantine conditions.
Ask for the safety data sheet at the quotation stage, and for battery products, the UN 38.3 test summary. If the supplier has never been asked for these, that tells you they have not exported this item by air before, which is useful information while you can still pick someone else. Dangerous goods regulations are reissued on a regular cycle, so confirm which edition applies to your shipment at the time you book rather than relying on last year’s answer.
Ask for FOB at a named port, even if you plan to buy EXW
“FOB China” means nothing. FOB followed by a specific port means the supplier has committed to getting the goods to that terminal, cleared for export, at their cost, and it gives you a comparable figure across suppliers in different provinces. Without a named port you cannot tell whether an inland factory has quietly absorbed a long trucking leg or is about to hand it to you.
Even buyers who intend to purchase EXW, or who expect to end up on a door-to-door arrangement, should ask for the FOB number first. It is the cleanest way to see how much origin cost is hiding inside a unit price. If a supplier offers a delivered price to your warehouse instead, ask for both, then check which one includes destination charges, duties and taxes and which one leaves them for you. The way Incoterms split those costs between buyer and seller is the whole game at this stage, and the difference between two quotes is often just where the line sits rather than who is cheaper.
A shortlist sheet you can run in an afternoon
Put your candidates side by side and fill this in from their own written answers. A blank cell is an answer.
| Check | Supplier A | Supplier B | Supplier C |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full pickup address supplied, production site confirmed | |||
| Usual export port named | |||
| Master carton dimensions and gross weight in writing | |||
| Can apply shipping marks and origin marking at the factory | |||
| Will deliver to a nominated warehouse on a set date | |||
| Exporting entity on the declaration can be named | |||
| Safety data sheet and, if relevant, UN 38.3 summary available | |||
| FOB price at a named port provided | |||
| Freight per unit at your target order size |
What to do once you have the answers
Once you hold a pickup address, carton dimensions and weights, a total volume and a destination postcode, freight stops being a guess. Those five inputs are enough to put a real number against each supplier before any deposit moves, and the ranking they produce is not always the one the unit prices suggested.
If you want that comparison run properly, send the carton data and pickup addresses for your shortlist and get a freight quote based on your real numbers rather than an estimate. Doing it at this point costs nothing and occasionally changes which factory gets the order, which is exactly the moment when that information is still useful.