The platform was built for lots, not for parcels.
Alibaba Group describes 1688 as China’s leading integrated domestic wholesale marketplace, founded in 1999, and says it had more than one million paying members in fiscal year 2024. Every one of those words points the same way: this is a place where businesses buy in quantity from other businesses, inside China.
Dropshipping asks the opposite of it — one unit, packed for a consumer, sent to a different address every time, with returns handled somewhere. A wholesale seller quoting you a carton price has not agreed to any of that, and often cannot do it at all.
So the question is not whether 1688 “supports” dropshipping. It is who performs the per-order steps, under what agreement, and whose name is on the paperwork when something goes wrong. That party is a real party with real obligations, not a plugin.
Three parties, and the duties that attach to each.
China’s Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Online Trading, in force since 1 May 2021, do not treat “the supplier” as one undifferentiated thing. Read against a dropshipping chain, the duties land in specific places.
| Party | What the rules require of them | What it means for your order |
|---|---|---|
| The 1688 seller | As an online business operator, must be registered as a market entity unless an exemption applies, and must publish its licence details prominently (Articles 8 and 12). | Their registration is checkable. Their willingness to pack single parcels is a separate question that no rule answers for you. |
| The platform | Must verify and register seller identity information and re-verify it at least once every six months (Article 24), and must distinguish registered from unregistered operators (Article 27). | A platform-side check exists, but it has a stated interval and it sits behind a Chinese-language interface. |
| The party in between | Is itself an online business operator when it sells on, with the same registration and disclosure duties — not a neutral pipe. | This is the position we occupy. It is why we invoice you in our own name rather than passing along someone else’s. |
The practical read: a dropshipping arrangement where nobody in the middle admits to being a seller is one where nobody in the middle is accountable either. If the goods are wrong, an intermediary that describes itself as a forwarding service has a much easier time saying the problem is between you and a factory you never contracted with.
What the rules cannot do is make any of this visible from outside China. The disclosures sit in Chinese-language interfaces, the registration mark says registered rather than registered to do this, and a code shown on a shop page is a claim until it is read against the register itself.
All of which is checkable, and not by us. Ask whoever sits in the middle for its own credit code, run it through the USCI checker in your browser, then compare the seller named on the contract, the issuer on the invoice and the beneficiary on the bank details with the payment-party checker. A party that will not give you a code to check has answered the question.
Four decisions before goods move.
- Fit: we decide whether this desk can quote the request as seller and decline categories or requirements we cannot support.
- Baseline: before payment, both sides agree the product, price basis, hand-off point, evidence, cancellation and refund terms in writing.
- Payment: Payment clears before goods move. We do not extend credit, net terms or purchase-order financing.
- Freight: we book export carriage to the destination you named and hand you the carrier’s tracking reference. The carrier’s charge is passed through at cost, and import clearance at the other end remains yours.
For a per-order model this rules out the version people usually mean by dropshipping, where stock is never bought and each sale triggers a shipment on credit. Here the goods are bought before they move, which means somebody has paid for them first. That somebody is you, and the trade-off is that no part of the chain is running on an advance.
The jobs this page deliberately leaves outside.
We do not blind-ship or falsify documents. We will not label a parcel as though it came from you, understate its value, or describe goods as something they are not. Buyers ask for this often enough that it belongs in a boundary list rather than a footnote.
We do not guarantee transit time or act as carrier. We book export carriage and pass the carrier’s charge through at cost, but the schedule, handling and liability limits are the carrier’s, not ours.
We do not calculate customs duty. Product classification, import clearance, destination tax and regulatory approval remain with you and your appointed specialists.
We do not finance purchases. We do not extend credit, advance supplier funds for you or carry inventory on your behalf.
We keep selling separate from checking. We will never verify a supplier for you and then offer to replace them with ourselves. If you need an independent record check, use the verification service; it does not recommend us or another supplier.
Send the smallest brief that can produce a real yes or no.
Email the product link or screenshot, specification, first-order quantity, destination country and required decision date to hello@currawongweb.com. Do not send passwords, marketplace login details, payment credentials or identity documents.
We will reply with the missing questions, a scoped quote under the payment rule above, or a decline. A decline is better than a desk claiming it can buy every category.
Buying a defined lot rather than per-order? The 1688 wholesale route starts from the same brief. Choosing who to buy through at all? What the register can and cannot tell you.
Official sources used for the platform and legal facts
Alibaba Group — 1688 business profile. Accessed 12 August 2026. It supports the founding year, the wholesale marketplace description and the FY2024 paying-member figure above; it does not support any claim about Currawong’s service capability.
Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Online Trading, State Administration for Market Regulation Order No. 37, published on the Chinese central government portal. Accessed 24 August 2026. Articles 8, 12, 24 and 27 support the duties described above. The text is authoritative in Chinese; the English wording here is our summary and is not an official translation, and nothing on this page is legal advice.