Shipping Toys from China to the United States

Most guides to importing toys talk about "certification" as though it were a single document. The United States asks for three distinct things, and having one does not help with the others.

The test. Section 106 of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 — 15 U.S.C. § 2056b — made ASTM F963 a mandatory consumer product safety standard for children’s toys, codified at 16 C.F.R. part 1250. The standard covers toys for children under 14; the third-party testing and certification obligation applies to those designed or intended primarily for children 12 and under. The testing must be done at a laboratory CPSC has accepted, not at the factory’s own bench.

The label. Under 15 U.S.C. § 2063(a)(5) children’s products carry permanent tracking markings — and CPSC is explicit that they go on the product and its packaging, not one or the other. This is the requirement that most often gets discovered after the container has sailed.

The certificate. A written Children’s Product Certificate identifying the product, citing each safety rule it complies with, naming the certifying party with a full address and telephone number, naming whoever holds the test records, stating the month, year, city and country of manufacture, and stating the dates and places of testing and the laboratory that did it.

Read the list of what the CPC must contain and the point becomes obvious: name, full mailing address and telephone number of the certifying entity, and name, address, email and telephone number of the person maintaining the test records.

That is not a description of a factory in Chenghai. CPSC requires domestic manufacturers and importers to issue the certificate. If you bring the goods in, you are the importer, and the obligation is yours — it cannot be bought, delegated or supplied in the carton.

This surprises people who have been sent a PDF headed "CPC" with a Chinese company’s letterhead. Such a document is not worthless; it tells you testing happened and names the laboratory. But it is an input to your certificate, not a substitute for it.

The practical consequence is a change in what you should ask a supplier for. Not "do you have a CPC" — the useful questions are which laboratory tested this item, on what date, against which version of ASTM F963, and can I have the report. Those are the lines that go on the certificate you sign.

Our cards carry the test documents the factory filed. We read all of them and sorted by standard, matching certificate names exactly — the loose way of counting is how "EAC" ends up being found inside "REACH".

Cross the columns and the picture sharpens:

• 28,032 items hold both EN71 and ASTM F963 — documented on both sides of the Atlantic.
• 14,790 hold EN71 and no ASTM F963 — the ones that read as "certified" and are not, for America.
• 6,514 have an ASTM F963 report but no CPC on file — tested, undeclared.
• 20,059 have the full American set together: ASTM F963, a factory CPC and CPSIA documentation.

Twenty thousand out of 385,341 is roughly one item in nineteen. We publish the ratio rather than the flattering half of it, because a buyer who assumes the other eighteen are equally ready will discover otherwise at the port.

Sea from China to the United States runs 18–40 days, air 8–12. Rail does not serve North America — it needs continuous track from China, which is why it appears for 29 of the 62 destinations in our transit table and not this one. Where DDP is offered, the per-kilo figure already includes export clearance, freight, clearance in the US and duties.

One thing worth knowing before you choose air: freight is billed on the greater of real weight and volumetric weight, and for toys the second nearly always wins. We measured the real carton dimensions of 316,704 items and found that a median toy carton weighs 16–23 kg on the scale whatever is in it, but bills as anything from 23 to 55 kg. A carton of dolls bills as 55.5 kg; a carton of board games of the same scale weight bills as 24.6. The full table by category is in our article on what you actually pay for when you ship toys.

What those two numbers are not. 18–40 days and 8–12 days are measured ranges for the lane, not a guaranteed arrival date for your batch: production at the factory, the wait for consolidation, customs and the carrier’s own loading all sit on top of them, and none of the four is ours to promise. The price on a card is the item itself, EXW: it does not include international freight, US customs duties or state and local taxes, and the freight part is billed on the greater of real and volumetric weight rather than on what the scale says.

What we do. We pull the actual test documents for any item before you order and tell you what is on file and what is missing — which standard, which laboratory, what date. Where an item has no American testing we ask the factory directly what it will test and on what terms, and come back with the answer rather than a guess. For the EAEU we arrange the certification ourselves on the customer’s order.

What we do not do. We do not issue your Children’s Product Certificate. Nobody can — the statute puts it on the importer, and a supplier claiming to hand you a finished US certificate is describing something that does not exist. We also do not describe our partner’s laboratory as CPSC-accepted, because its accreditation is the Chinese CCC scheme and we have no source saying otherwise.

OPTTOYSCHINA is a wholesale platform operated by OPTTOYSCHINA LLP, Kazakhstan: catalog, requests and product selection. The seller — invoice, payment, export, documents and claims — is our manufacturing partner Yifeng Group, China. The catalogue holds 385,341 items from 5,233 factories, with the price published per piece and per carton, the carton quantity and the box dimensions stated, and the maker named on every card. The minimum is one factory carton of one model; minimum order total 2,000 CNY (≈ $313). The minimum is not our rule: it is the size of the factory carton, and it differs from model to model — from a dozen pieces to several hundred on the same page.

Our manufacturing partner is Yifeng Group (艺丰集团) in Chenghai, Shantou. The group has worked in Chenghai since 1992; its first plant, Shifeng Culture Development Co., Ltd, dates from that year and runs more than 35,000 m² of production area with an annual output of USD 60 M. AJT Testing Services Limited, founded in 2007, is historically linked with the group’s founding family and works in the same Chenghai ecosystem; the group keeps a permanent 15,000 m² showroom in Shantou with more than 500,000 toy samples. See our factory partner page.

Every batch is checked line by line with photo and video before the cartons are taped, and transit ranges are published for 62 destinations.

They are what the factory filed, not a legal opinion. A document on file says testing happened; whether it covers the version of the standard in force today, and whether it covers the exact variant you are ordering, is a question for the report itself. We will send it to you.

Browse the items that do carry a document — price, carton and factory on each →

There is no expiry date in the data. Our records carry the issue date and not an end date, so we write "test certificate on file from the factory" and never "valid certificate". The difference matters and we would rather be the ones to point it out.

And this is not legal advice. It is a reading of CPSC’s own published requirements, checked against our own catalogue on 24 September 2026. The rules change, the standard gets revised, and the person who signs the certificate is you — which is exactly why it is worth reading the regulator directly.