Buyer questionAnswered from the China side
Import from China to India: which checks are yours, and which one is ours.
Most guides written for Indian importers stop at the paperwork you file in India, and most guides written from China stop at finding a factory. The expensive gap is between them: the registrations that must exist on your side before a shipment moves, the certificate that has to name the right Chinese entity, and the single question — who exactly am I paying — that neither a customs broker nor a sourcing agent is going to answer for you. This page sorts those into what is yours, what is your broker’s, and the one part that sits on the China side.
INDIA IMPORT ROUTE / 01
The order matters, because two of these steps cannot be undone.
Everything below is recoverable except the wire transfer and, in practice, the tooling deposit. Get the sequence right and the rest is administration.
Three registrations that must exist on your side before anything ships
IEC — Importer Exporter Code. Issued by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT). Without it a commercial import cannot be cleared in your name. It is a one-time registration and it is the first thing to have, not the last.
GST registration. Import IGST is paid at clearance and claimed as input credit afterwards — which only works if the registration is in place and the invoice details match it.
AD Code registration. Your bank issues an Authorised Dealer code, and it has to be registered at the specific port through which your consignment arrives. This is the step first-time importers most often discover late, because nothing earlier in the process asks for it, and a consignment sitting at a port waiting for an AD Code registration accrues demurrage while you sort it out.
Confirm all three with DGFT, your GST practitioner and your bank respectively — the requirements are theirs to state, not ours. What we can tell you is that none of them says anything about whether the company at the other end of the transaction is real.
Whether your product needs BIS — and why that certificate points at the Chinese factory
India brings products under mandatory certification through Quality Control Orders (QCOs). Where a QCO covers your product, it must carry the ISI mark and the manufacturer must hold a BIS licence before the goods can enter the market. Products outside any QCO do not need it.
The part that matters for supplier selection: for goods made abroad, BIS certification runs through the Foreign Manufacturers Certification Scheme — the scheme is, by its name and design, addressed to the overseas manufacturer. So when a Chinese supplier sends you a BIS certificate, that document is about a Chinese manufacturing entity. It is not about you, and it is not automatically about the company that will issue your invoice.
That is where two very ordinary situations start to look identical on paper. In the first, the factory holds the licence and its trading arm invoices you — entirely normal. In the second, a trading company forwards a certificate belonging to a factory it merely buys from, and your compliance file now rests on a document about someone else. Both look the same in an email. They differ in whether the name on the certificate matches the name on your contract, your invoice and your payment instruction — and those names are checkable.
Scope and dates change, and they are not ours to state. A QCO for household, commercial and similar electrical appliances has been reported as taking effect from 1 October 2026, covering 90-plus categories — we have that from trade press rather than from BIS directly, so treat it as a prompt to check, not as the answer. Whether your specific product is covered, and by which order, is a question for BIS or a certification consultant.
Duty, HS classification and clearance: not our lane, and not a guide’s either
“Import duty from china to india” is the single most searched question around this topic, and it is the one no general guide should answer with a number. The rate depends on the tariff classification of your specific product, the measures in force on the day of entry, and any anti-dumping or safeguard duty applying to that line. All three move.
Ask your customs broker for a landed-cost estimate against the actual HS code, and treat the classification itself as a decision worth getting right early — the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs is the authority on it, not a supplier’s quotation. A supplier telling you the duty rate is a supplier guessing about your country.
We do not clear customs, we do not quote freight, and we do not calculate duty. A page that pretended otherwise would be the least useful thing on this site.
The China-side check that is actually ours
Everything above is about India. This part is not, and it is the part your broker, your CA and your freight forwarder all leave to you.
A Chinese company exists in a state register under one exact Chinese name and one 18-character Unified Social Credit Code. The English name on an Alibaba storefront, an email signature or a proforma invoice is a trading style — it is not registered and cannot be searched. So the first question is mechanical: does the name and code they gave you resolve to a live registered entity, and is that entity registered for the activity you are buying?
The second question is the one that decides whether your money is recoverable: does the bank account you have been asked to pay belong to that same registered company. When the beneficiary is a different company, an individual, or an account in a third jurisdiction, that is not automatically fraud — but it is always something to resolve before the wire, because an international transfer is not reversible on request.
Both checks return a record with a source and a query date. Neither is an opinion about whether the supplier is good to work with.
The two steps you cannot take back
The deposit. Once an international wire lands, your leverage is whatever the contract and the relationship give you — and on a first order that is usually very little. Everything you intend to verify about the counterparty should happen before this, not after.
Tooling and moulds. Paid separately, often to the same account, and frequently the largest single sum on a first project. Establish who owns the tooling in writing before it is cut.
If a supplier explains a beneficiary mismatch with urgency — a frozen account, a year-end audit, a “temporary” alternative — treat the urgency itself as the reason to slow down.
What this page deliberately does not tell you
Which products are profitable to import. That is a market question about your channel and your margins, and anyone answering it from a distance is guessing.
Duty rates, freight quotes and transit times. Country-specific, date-specific, and better sourced from your broker and forwarder this week than from any guide.
Whether the goods will be any good. No register holds product quality. It comes from an approved sample and an inspection against a written specification.
Whether a certificate is genuine. We verify the Chinese entity named on it against the Chinese public record. Confirming that a BIS licence is live and covers the product is a question for BIS.
If you already have a supplier in front of you
Ask for a photograph of the business licence (营业执照) to get the exact registered Chinese name and the 18-character code, then check them against the public record rather than against the document you were sent. It takes minutes and it is the cheapest step in the whole sequence.
Every line we deliver names its source and the date it was queried, and states what it cannot show. We verify records; we do not certify suppliers, and we are not a substitute for a customs broker, a certification body or legal advice.