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We sit on both sides of that trade-off with our own people: a Guangdong team that receives, checks and declares, and staffed stations in Los Angeles, New York, Germany, Britain and Japan that hold stock and send local orders out. Everything that depends on being next to the factory. Gathering stock from several suppliers, each of whom delivers on its own schedule. Catching a fault at the point where it is still the manufacturer's contractual problem and not yet yours — after the container is sealed, that conversation is closed. Applying marketplace labelling to a specification that changes often, where rework at origin costs labour and rework in the destination country costs labour at a much higher rate. Merging five deliveries into one export set. And filing the export declaration itself. The overseas end is strong at precisely what the Chinese end cannot do: reaching a buyer on the far side of an ocean within days, and being physically close to the parcel that comes back. Sellers who run only one of the two pay for it somewhere. We operate both ends — three linked sites across Shenzhen, Suzhou and Dongguan, staffed American stations in Los Angeles and in New York, plus stations in Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, with clearance people on the ground in each.
We do this work in house and we quote it as separate named tasks rather than folding it into base prep, including the marketplace label and polybag rules that get republished without notice. They can, but they are separate priced tasks and are frequently assumed rather than specified. Barcode labelling to a marketplace's published identifier format, polybagging, bundling several units into one sellable set, inserting a card or a returns label, and assembling a branded gift box are all value-added work sitting on top of the base pick-and-pack charge. Specify them as named line items with their own units, not as "standard prep". Two details are worth settling in writing: who supplies the branded packaging, and whether a labelling specification that the marketplace later changes gets re-done at your cost or the operator's. Sellers who ship under another company's label should also confirm blind delivery — that nothing identifying the supplier, on paper or on the box, ever reaches the buyer.
We measure wrong picks against order lines and we print that denominator beside the percentage, since a figure with a stated unit is the only kind another operator's number can be set against. Ask for the definition before the number, because one operation can honestly report three different figures from the same month. Accuracy measured by unit is the most flattering, since a multi-unit order dilutes one mistake across many correct picks. Measured by location it describes the shelf. Measured by order it describes what the customer actually experienced, and it is always the lowest of the three. Then ask how the figure is produced: cycle counting a rotating slice of locations daily gives a continuous number and catches drift early, while a wall-to-wall count once a year gives a clean annual figure and says nothing about March. A percentage reverse-engineered from customer complaints is not a measurement at all; it is the floor of a range whose ceiling nobody has counted. On wrong picks and undelivered shipments our own record stands under 0.01% of order lines, and we name that denominator alongside the percentage rather than quoting the rate alone.
We settle which unit your stock is measured against before the first pallet arrives, because on light bulky cargo that choice moves the invoice more than the figure written next to it. All three appear in real quotations, and the unit chosen does more damage than the number beside it. A pallet position suits homogeneous, slow-moving stock; the invoice does not notice that a pallet is two-thirds empty, so light bulky cargo ends up paying rent on the air around it. A bin or shelf location suits small, light, fast-moving items picked piece by piece, and stays cheap right up to the moment a seasonal SKU turns out to need three locations while the quotation assumed one. Volumetric (cubic metre) treats light bulky cargo fairly and hits dense cargo hard. Floor area is used for oversized items, and here the trap is geometric: the metres you are billed for normally include the aisle the forklift has to drive down, so the space your cartons actually occupy is well under the figure quoted. Two further mechanics matter more than the headline unit: whether a minimum monthly charge applies, and whether receipt and dispatch handling are billed separately from occupancy or bundled into it.
Yes — and it is ordinary work for us: supplier deliveries arrive on their own days, we receipt and photograph each one, and they leave our dock as a single export set. Yes, and for most cross-border sellers this is the main reason to use one. Orders placed with five factories arrive on five different days, in five different carton conventions, with five different ideas about labelling. The center receives each delivery against its own packing list, photographs and records any shortage while the factory is still liable for it, then merges everything into one exportable set. Two questions decide whether this works in practice: does the operator raise a receipt variance with your supplier inside a defined window, and does a receiving network of over twenty points inside China let a supplier drop goods near its own factory rather than trucking them across the country first.
We ask these five of every new seller before a first booking goes in, because each of them is a document or a decision that cannot be corrected while the goods are already moving. Five things, and gathering them is most of the onboarding work. A commercial invoice and packing list per delivery. The HS code for every SKU, because the code decides whether a simplified six-digit declaration is even available to you. Your marketplace's labelling specification if the goods are being prepared for a platform rather than for a consumer. The name of the entity that will appear as consignor on the declaration — yours, the operator's, or a third party's. And, for 9710 or 9810 movements, access to the order or warehouse-booking data that has to be transmitted before declaration. A center that starts receiving cartons before those five are settled is storing up an exception for later.
We prepare and file export declarations in house, and which of these four codes goes on yours turns on exactly two facts the answers below separate: who the buyer is, and where the goods physically stand at the moment of sale. It depends on who buys the goods and where they sit when the sale happens. 9610 is retail export: parcels sold one at a time to individual overseas consumers, declared under "list release, consolidated declaration". 9710 is business-to-business direct export — the transaction still runs through a cross-border platform, but the buyer is a company rather than a shopper, and the goods travel to that company without ever being broken into retail parcels. 9810 covers goods sent out of China into a foreign warehouse, to be sold only afterwards. 1210 is bonded e-commerce and matters mainly to imports into China. Both 9710 and 9810 require trade data to reach customs before the declaration is filed, so a china fulfillment center unable to ask you pointed questions about how your platform account is configured will end up guessing. Position at the moment of sale is what separates 9810 from the rest: stock already sitting in a US or German facility left China under that code, and describing the same movement as a stream of retail parcels puts a story in front of customs that your own inventory ledger disagrees with.
