A chat thread is not a shopfront.
Buying from a small Chinese shop usually happens in a conversation. Prices are quoted in messages, product photos arrive as images, and the agreement — if there is one — is whatever both sides remember. That works between people who already know each other. Across a border, with money moving first, it leaves nothing to fall back on.
So what this desk needs before quoting is the same as anywhere else: the exact item, the specification that decides acceptance, quantity, destination country and the date you need a decision by. What is different here is that we also need something identifying the shop itself, because a shop with no public page has no public record attached to it either.
If you cannot get a registered name or a credit code out of a seller, that is information about the transaction, not a paperwork snag. It does not automatically mean the seller is dishonest. It does mean nobody — not us, not you, not any service — can check them.
What a Chinese online seller must publish about itself.
China’s Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Online Trading, in force since 1 May 2021, require an online business operator to display its own details prominently and continuously on the main page where it does business (Article 12). The required fields are not the same for every kind of operator, and the differences are informative.
| Operator type | Fields that must be published | What it tells a buyer |
|---|---|---|
| Company | Unified social credit code, name, entity type, legal representative, domicile, registered capital. | The fullest picture: who signs, where it sits, and what capital was declared. |
| Individually-owned business | Unified social credit code, name, operator’s personal name, business premises, form of organisation. | No legal representative and no registered capital — because there is a person, not a company, behind it. |
| Farmer co-operative | Unified social credit code, name, legal representative, domicile, total member contributions. | Relevant mostly for agricultural goods. |
| Operator relying on the exemption | No licence — instead a self-declaration that it falls within the no-registration cases. | Turnover under RMB 100,000 a year (Article 8, shops aggregated). A private individual, not a supply base. |
The row that matters most for small shops is the second one. An individually-owned business publishes a person’s name where a company would publish a legal representative, and publishes no registered capital at all. If a seller sends you a credit code and you find that shape of record, you have not found a factory — you have found one person trading under a licence, which may be exactly right for a small order and clearly wrong for a large one.
What none of this fixes is reachability. These disclosures are written for a Chinese-language interface and a domestic audience, the rule speaks of the “main page where business is conducted” without deciding what that means inside a messaging app, and a code handed to you in a chat is a claim until it is read against the register itself.
The check itself is short. A credit code goes through the USCI checker in your browser to confirm its structure and check digit, and the payment-party checker tells you whether the party quoting, the entity invoicing and the account receiving are the same one. Nothing is uploaded, and the same two checks apply to us.
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.
Small-shop orders are where a small first order earns its keep. There is no delivery record to lean on here, on either side of the transaction.
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 details 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 larger marketplace instead? The Taobao retail route and the 1688 wholesale route start from a product link.
Official source used for the disclosure rules
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 and 12 support the exemption threshold and the disclosure fields set out 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.
This page makes no claim about how any particular platform implements these rules, and describes no platform’s own published statements, because we have not tested them.