No Hidden Charges: How Your Final Invoice Is Built

Every item carries two published prices — per unit and per carton. Both are visible without registration, without an enquiry form and without talking to a sales manager. The per-unit price is the carton price divided by the carton quantity; no third number appears at checkout.

That price already covers everything that happens between the factory and our Guangzhou warehouse: buying from the producer, domestic Chinese logistics, intake and inspection of the consignment. Only three things are added on top — conversion, your bank’s transfer fee and freight — and all three are set out below.

We charge no transaction commission, no sourcing fee and no “handling” invoice. Your bill has exactly as many lines as the table at the end of this page.

Official People’s Bank of China (PBOC) rate + 5%.

That’s it. That is our entire margin, and there is only one of it.

What the 5% covers: cross-border payments in yuan to dozens of separate factories, the Guangzhou consolidation warehouse, visual inspection at intake, and platform operations. It is not a bank spread and not a “floating internal rate” — it is a fixed, published delta.

How to verify. Open the PBOC site, take today’s rate, add five percent. That is exactly the figure your order is calculated at. Not approximately — exactly.

When it’s fixed. The rate is taken on the day payment is actually made. If a week passes between placing and paying and the rate moves, your order is calculated on the payment date.

Compare that with any other intermediary, where “what rate do you use?” is answered with “our internal one.”

A worked example

Say the PBOC rate on your payment date is 7.10 yuan to the dollar.
Your rate: 7.10 × 1.05 = 7.455.
A carton priced at 300 yuan costs you 300 ÷ 7.455 = $40.24.

The rate in this example is illustrative — check the day’s rate. The mechanics are real.

Bank charges on an international payment sit with the sender. In SWIFT terms that is the OUR charge type: the sender covers all costs and the beneficiary receives the full invoice amount.

In practice. The exact invoice amount must land in our account. If a correspondent bank takes thirty dollars along the way, that difference has to be topped up — otherwise the order counts as partially paid.

This isn’t our rule and it isn’t a revenue line. It’s the standard of international settlement, and the only useful thing we can do about it is tell you before your payment arrives short rather than after.

Tip. Confirm the charge type with your bank before sending and select OUR. It costs a little more at the transfer stage and saves a great deal at the reconciliation stage.

Delivery from the factory gate — in Shantou, Chenghai or any other manufacturing hub — to our consolidation warehouse in Guangzhou costs you nothing.

Why. We give factories continuous order volume, so they deliver to our hub at their own expense. A one-off buyer doesn’t get that: domestic delivery appears as a separate line on their invoice, and it’s one of the costs people discover last.

You pay nothing to move cartons around China, however many factories are involved in your order.

Stage one — the goods. 100% prepayment for the cartons themselves. Factories do not release stock from their warehouse without it; that is their condition, not ours.

Stage two — freight, separately and only on fact. Once every carton from every factory has arrived at the Guangzhou warehouse, the consignment is inspected, weighed and measured. Volumetric weight is calculated as length × width × height ÷ 6000, the greater of actual and volumetric is taken, and only then is your final DDP freight invoice issued. Once freight is paid, the shipment departs.

Why this matters more than it looks. An intermediary who takes freight money up front is estimating it — and the difference always lands in their favour. We physically cannot name the exact figure before the consignment is assembled: until the cartons are on the scale, nobody on earth knows what they weigh or how much space they take. So we don’t name it.

There are no other lines. If a line appears in your calculation that isn’t in this table, tell us — it’s an error.

An order has more cost lines than an invoice shows, and the ones that surprise people are rarely the large ones. Six places money leaves quietly.

The exchange rate spread. An internal rate that cannot be checked is a cost with no number attached. Ours is the People's Bank of China reference rate plus 5 %, published, which means you can compute the exact figure yourself at any time.

Transfer fees. International wires have three possible fee arrangements, and under two of them the amount arriving is less than the amount sent — which shows up later as a mysterious shortfall on the order. We use OUR, meaning the sender covers the fees and the full amount arrives.

Domestic Chinese logistics. Moving goods from twenty factories to one warehouse is real work that somebody pays for. We do not bill it separately.

Storage. Goods sit at the consolidation warehouse free for 30 days, which is what makes ordering in waves and shipping once possible.

The volumetric penalty. Not a fee, but the largest avoidable cost most small importers carry, and invisible until the freight is calculated.

Duty and tax at arrival. Not ours to charge and not ours to predict, but the line that most often turns a good margin into a bad one when it was left out of the sum.

The only price that matters is what a unit costs standing in your warehouse. It is arithmetic, and it takes ten minutes per order.

Start with the carton price as published, converted at the stated formula.

Add the carton's share of the freight. Take the shipment's total freight and allocate it by each carton's chargeable weight, not by its price. This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the step that reveals which products are quietly unprofitable.

Add duty and tax at your own rates.

Divide by the piece count. That is your landed unit cost.

Compare it to your selling price, not to the purchase price. A product with a low purchase price and a high landed cost can easily have a worse margin than an expensive dense product, and no invoice will ever tell you that.

Keep the sheet across orders and a pattern appears within two or three shipments: a group of products that consistently land cheaply and sell steadily. That group, not the cheapest line on any price list, is the actual business.

The most common question about our process is why freight is not quoted at the moment of ordering. The answer is that at that moment it does not exist.

Freight is a function of what the shipment physically is: how many cartons, what they weigh, what space they occupy. Until the goods are gathered at the warehouse and put on a scale, any figure is an estimate built on assumptions about carton sizes that may be wrong. Quoting early is easy and it is how buyers end up with a number at order time and a different number at payment time.

So the sequence is deliberate: goods are paid before purchase, because factories are paid before they ship; freight is paid after weighing, because that is when the number becomes real. Two stages, both against measured quantities, and no third number appearing at the end.

The trade-off is honest and worth stating: you commit to the goods before you know the exact freight. What makes that acceptable is that the inputs are all visible in advance — every product page carries its carton weight and dimensions, and the volumetric calculation is published. A buyer who wants to know the freight before ordering can compute it to within a few per cent from the catalogue. What we will not do is invent a precise-looking number before the scale has seen the boxes.

A pricing page is more credible for what it rules out than for what it promises. Five things, stated as commitments rather than aspirations.

No price that changes after you order. The carton price published on the day you order is the price on your invoice. Not a starting point, not subject to confirmation with the factory.

No rate that cannot be checked. The People's Bank of China reference rate plus 5 %. Both halves are public — the rate from the central bank, the percentage from us — which means you can reproduce our arithmetic exactly, whenever you like.

No fee that appears at the end. Domestic Chinese logistics is not billed separately. Storage within 30 days is not billed. There is no handling fee, no documentation fee, no small-order surcharge and no account fee.

No worse terms for buying less. The per-carton price on one carton is the same per-carton price as on fifty. The exchange rate is the same. The transfer arrangement is the same.

No estimate presented as a quote. Freight is calculated after physical weighing. Where we cannot yet know a number, we say we do not know it rather than producing a confident figure that changes later.

Where the price does move, it moves for reasons outside this page: the central bank rate changes daily, factories change their carton prices, and freight rates move with season and capacity. What stays fixed is the method — and a method you can check is worth more than a promise you cannot.

Everything on this page is designed to be verified rather than trusted, and it takes about ten minutes with the documents you already have.

Check the rate. Look up the People's Bank of China reference rate for the date your order was priced, add 5 %, and compare with the rate applied to your invoice. Both inputs are public.

Check the goods total. Multiply each carton price by the number of cartons and sum. The result should equal the goods line exactly, with no additional percentages.

Check the freight. Take the packing list, compute volumetric weight for each carton from its dimensions, compare with the actual weights, take the greater of the two totals, and apply your route's rate — with the 100 kg floor if the shipment is small. You should land within a few per cent.

Check what is not there. No line for domestic Chinese logistics. No storage charge inside 30 days. No handling, documentation or small-order fee.

If any of those four checks does not reconcile, tell us and we will explain the difference or correct it. A pricing method that cannot be audited by the person paying is not transparency, whatever it is called.

The payment structure is two stages rather than one, and the split is not arbitrary.

Stage one, before purchase: the goods. Chinese factories are paid before they ship, which is the norm across the industry and not a preference of ours. The amount is known exactly at the moment you order, because both prices are published and the exchange rate is a formula.

Stage two, after weighing: the freight. The number does not exist earlier, and inventing one would mean either padding it to be safe or correcting it later. Neither is acceptable, so the freight is invoiced when the scale has produced a figure.

The consequence worth stating honestly is that there is a gap between committing to the goods and knowing the freight exactly. That gap is closable by you: carton weights and dimensions are published on every product page, so a buyer who wants a number in advance can compute one to within a few per cent. What we will not do is present that estimate as though it were a quote.