Looking for a China sourcing agent? Start by knowing what the register cannot tell you.

Agent and seller are not two words for the same job.

An agent acts in your name. The purchase contract is between you and the factory; the agent arranges it and takes a commission. Because the factory usually wants money before production, an agent that promises to handle everything is often advancing funds — yours, or its own against your credit.

A seller acts in its own name. It buys the goods, takes title, and sells them on to you. The contract you hold is with the seller, not the factory. There is no commission, because the margin is in the price you were quoted.

This desk is the second kind, and it does not advance funds in either direction. That rules out some things you might want — nobody here will front a deposit so you can pay later — and it removes a failure mode that is common in the first kind, where the person holding your money and the person owing you goods are not the same party.

You cannot find one of these firms by searching for the name.

The obvious first move is to look up China’s company register for firms that describe themselves as trading, sourcing or procurement businesses. On 22 August 2026 we ran exactly that, across eighteen common name endings, and counted what came back.

Sixteen of the eighteen endings ran past the register’s display ceiling. Only the narrowest wordings returned a real number, and those describe inspection work rather than buying. What the register is telling you is not that there are exactly five thousand trading companies — it is that the population is large enough that a name search cannot narrow it.

Two of the eighteen returned an unexplained empty result. We are not going to guess at the cause, and we have not published those two as zero.

The practical consequence is the opposite of what a buyer usually hopes for. The register is not a directory you can shop from; it is a record you check a name against once you already have one. Selection has to happen on a defined scope and a written brief. The register joins in afterwards, to confirm that the party you settled on exists, who controls it, and whether its declared scope covers the work — which is a real and checkable thing, just not a search you can start from.

Counts name endings, not services offered. A company with “trading” in its name may do something else entirely, and a firm doing this work may use none of these words. No company was named, evaluated, ranked or recommended. Raw counts: .ai/inspection-market-size-2026-08-22.json.

None of which requires hiring anyone. Once a specific counterparty has given you a name or a credit code, the USCI checker validates the code in your browser and the payment-party checker compares the contract, invoice and bank names against each other. That is the checkable half, it is free, and it applies when the counterparty being checked is us.

Four decisions before goods move.

1. Fit: we decide whether this desk can quote the request as seller and decline categories or requirements we cannot support.
2. Baseline: before payment, both sides agree the product, price basis, hand-off point, evidence, cancellation and refund terms in writing.
3. Payment: Payment clears before goods move. We do not extend credit, net terms or purchase-order financing.
4. 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.

A first order should be small enough that both sides learn something real from it. This desk has no long delivery record to point at, and sizing the first order as though it did would be the first thing said here that was not true.

The jobs this page deliberately leaves outside.

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 from a specific marketplace? The 1688 wholesale route and the Taobao retail route describe the same desk starting from a product link. For parcels sent one at a time see per-order fulfilment; for shops with no public page see the Weidian route.

Where the figures above come from

The company counts were produced by querying China’s company register for each name ending in turn and recording the number of results, on 22 August 2026, from a mainland China vantage point. Only totals were recorded; no individual company record was retrieved, stored, evaluated or recommended. The register’s result list is capped at 5,000, which is why sixteen of the eighteen figures are floors rather than counts.

Nothing on this page is legal advice, a credit rating, a factory audit or a supplier recommendation.