Business & B2B

Most apparel buyers plan a sourcing week around one city and miss how the supply chain is actually arranged. This guide covers why one garment crosses several provinces, what Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong each do best, the four checks that decide a textile visit - fabric source, lab dips, the sample room and compliance documents - and how to fit three provinces into one week by high-speed rail.

Most buyers arrive in Yiwu expecting a single market and find a distribution system with a shopping front end. This guide covers how the districts are arranged by product family, why the stall in front of you is rarely the factory behind it, how to brief and use a buying agent day, how sampling turns a walk into decisions, and how to consolidate several small orders so they leave one city as one shipment.

Guangdong is a set of manufacturing clusters rather than a single market. This guide maps what each one is genuinely good at - Shenzhen for electronics and components, Dongguan and Foshan for hardware, appliances and furniture, Guangzhou for trade and fairs, Huizhou and Zhongshan for appliances and lighting - and explains why travel time between the clusters shapes a sourcing week, and why meeting a factory in the cluster it belongs to tells you more than any showroom.

Most of what decides how smoothly an order leaves China is settled before it is packed. This guide covers the three ways goods travel - hand-carry, courier and freight - what a shipment should travel with and why samples must be described accurately, how packing, labelling and consolidation work when several suppliers are involved, and when it pays to stop improvising and appoint a freight forwarder.

Most of what a trade fair is worth is decided in the two weeks after you fly home. This guide covers sorting the card pile while the meetings are still fresh, the short follow-up that actually gets a reply, the four things to ask every supplier for so the answers can be compared, why a factory and a trading company are different contacts, and how to keep a shortlist alive when you are not ready to order yet.

The Canton Fair is three fairs in three weeks, not one event. This buyer's week plan shows how to pick the phase that carries your list, why a day of early arrival pays for itself at Pazhou, how to choose a hotel and sort the badge, how to run a day of halls and conversations, and how to carry your energy through the second half of a long fair.

Group business travel is its own discipline. This guide shows a delegation organiser why a large group runs on one file and one coordinator, how to hold a room block and settle billing and transport, how to run parallel meetings with the right interpretation, and how to carry duty of care through the day the programme has to change - plus what to settle before anyone books a flight.

In China the evening is part of the business, not a break from it. This guide shows a delegation organiser how to match the programme to the relationship, read the different registers of traditional performance, arrange a banquet properly - private room, menu, dietary requirements, seating and toasts - and be a good guest as well as a good host, down to the gift and the written thank-you the next morning.

A meeting in China is often decided before anyone speaks, by the room, the seating and the clock. This guide covers matching the venue to the purpose, reading the seating and name-card logic, planning interpretation and print materials with enough lead time, keeping punctuality, breaks and meals inside the schedule, and holding the day together when a senior host resets the plan. It closes with what a visiting party is expected to bring to the table.

A commercial negotiation in China succeeds or fails on whether both sides leave with the same understanding. This guide covers the order of the conversation, why the first quotation is an opening position built on hidden assumptions, the trade-offs that sit beside the unit figure, and how to test a price through questions about cost structure rather than demands for a discount. It closes with the written summary that catches a misunderstanding while it is still cheap to fix.

A meeting succeeds or fails on whether both sides hear the same thing. This guide covers the three modes of interpretation and which meeting each serves, why a friendly generalist is the wrong choice for a price discussion, how to brief an interpreter with a bilingual glossary and a confidentiality undertaking, the etiquette of a room with three people in it, and how to keep sensitive terms from being improvised in translation.

The gap between a handshake and a loaded container is where most first orders are won or lost. This guide covers sample approval and the golden sample, bilingual specifications, who owns the tooling, how to tie each payment to an observable milestone, the difference between production time and delivery time, pre-shipment inspection, and the documents a buyer should expect before the goods leave.

A factory visit is where a supplier stops being a description and becomes something you can see. This guide covers what to watch on the production floor, which functions to insist on meeting, the questions that reveal whether you are in a workshop or a sales office, how to record what you saw, and the follow-up that turns a single visit into a working relationship.

A supplier can mean a directory, a trading company or a manufacturer, and each one sells you something different. This guide shows how to brief a sourcing search so the shortlist points at real workshops, which questions about ownership, capacity and subcontracted work reveal who you are actually meeting, how to check the claim of being a factory, and why a local coordinator can arrange the visits without becoming your agent of record.