Our position
The middleman is the problem.
Almost every “China sourcing agent” in this market is paid by the factory. That single fact explains most of what goes wrong for buyers.
If a sourcing agent earns 3–10% from the factory, then the agent’s interest is that the deal happens — at any price, with any supplier, as quickly as possible. The buyer’s interest is the lowest defensible price with the most reliable supplier. Those two interests point in opposite directions, and the buyer usually cannot see which way the agent is leaning.
This is why “factory verification” from a commission-based agent is close to worthless. You are asking the person who gets paid when you say yes whether you should say yes.
So we removed the incentive entirely. We do not accept commission, rebate, gift, hospitality or referral fees from any factory, inspection company, freight forwarder or certification body. Our only revenue is the fee you pay us.
What that means in practice
It means the only way we earn more is by being worth more to you — which means telling you when a supplier looks wrong, when a price does not hold up, and when we simply could not confirm something. A commission-paid agent cannot afford to say any of those things.
The document we hand to every factory
One printed page, in both languages.
Not a policy on a website. A physical sheet we carry to every visit and give to whoever meets us at the gate. The factory keeps it; the point is that they read it before they talk about money.
The last page of every report
Interests declaration
Every report ends with a signed statement. Even when the answer is “nothing was offered”, the section exists — because the existence of the section is the commitment.
Declaration of interests
Visit referenceVCF-0000-000
VerifierName, signed
Factory offered anything of value?No / Yes (details attached)
Any third party paid a referral fee?No / Yes (details attached)
Any current commercial relationship with the supplier?None
False statements in this declaration void the engagement and are disclosed to the client.
What we will not do
The refusals are the product.
- Accept commission, rebate or gifts from a factory
- Take a referral fee from inspection companies, forwarders or labs
- Act as a supplier’s agent or find them customers
- Hold your money or pay the factory on your behalf
- Give a verdict that a supplier is “safe” or “a scam”
- Inspect product quality or issue pass/fail on goods
- Impersonate a regulator, an employee or the buyer himself
- Film inside premises after being asked to stop
- Guarantee a price reduction we cannot control
- Take a job where we would be paid by both sides
The principle
We don’t make any decision for you.
We’re your eyes and ears.
A decision needs context we don’t have: your margin, your customer, your appetite for risk, what happens to your business if this order goes wrong. What we have is a pair of eyes at an address and a camera that doesn’t cut.
So we report. You decide. That division is deliberate, and it is the reason our reports are worth reading — there is nothing in them we need you to conclude.
- We do go, look, film, photograph, and write down what we saw.
- We don’t score the supplier, recommend a course of action, or tell you it is safe to pay.
- You get the raw evidence and an explicit list of what the visit could not establish.
Being honest about the cost
This stance costs us money.
In this industry, factory commissions and markups are where the real margin is. Service fees are the small part. By refusing the former, we give up most of the upside — which is exactly why our fees are $500 and $1,000 rather than $99, and why we do not run discounts or pack in extras.
It also means we sometimes get worse cooperation from factories than an agent with a commission would. We accept that. You are not hiring us to be liked by suppliers.
Who you’re dealing with
We are not one person with a phone.
We are a distributed team with people on the ground across China’s main manufacturing belts. That is why we can reach a factory in Foshan on Monday and one in Ningbo on Wednesday without either job turning into a three-day trip.
Local people, not a courier
Every visit is done by someone who lives in that industrial belt, speaks the local dialect where it matters, and knows what a real production floor looks like.
One brief, one standard
Everyone works from the same checklist and the same filming route, so a report from Dongguan and a report from Wenzhou are directly comparable.
A named person signs every report
You always know who went, when, and what they saw. No anonymous subcontractors.
Founder
Beigai 北丐
Founder of 出海计划, a China-based programme that teaches exporters to find overseas buyers without paid ads. Seventeen years building internet businesses, published in public the whole way.
Official site ibeigai.comI have spent seventeen years building businesses on the Chinese internet. For the last several I have run 出海计划 — a programme for Chinese exporters trying to reach buyers overseas. That work is the mirror image of this one: they cannot see the buyer, and you cannot see the factory.
Most verification services in this market are anonymous. You send money to a website, and if it goes wrong there is nobody behind it you could hold accountable. I am built the other way round: my name, my face and my public audience are attached to every engagement.
Why we tell you this
Reputation is the collateral we post.
In this market, almost every “verification service” is anonymous. You wire money to a website and there is nobody behind it you could ever hold accountable. We are built the opposite way round.
Our founder publishes in public to 100,000+ followers across platforms. The name on this business is the same name on that account. If we ever took a factory’s commission, it would be public within a day — and it would end the business. That is not a promise we are asking you to believe. It is a structural fact about how we are set up.
We care more about our name than about any single order. That is exactly why you can use it.
On this subject
Three questions.
Do you take commission from factories?
No. Not a commission, not a rebate, not a gift, not hospitality. We are paid by buyers only. We hand every factory we visit a written no-commission notice, and every report has a signed interests declaration. This is the whole point of our position — see Our position.
Do you inspect product quality?
No. Quality inspection is a different discipline with different standards (AQL sampling, defect classification) and different liability. We deliberately do not do it. If you need it, we will tell you who to talk to — and we take no referral fee from them either.
Who actually goes?
A named member of our team who lives in that industrial belt. Their name is on the report. We do not subcontract to anonymous couriers, and we do not send someone who has never walked a production floor.