I placed another order with one of my familiar suppliers in China, with delivery to a sole proprietor and payment of all taxes.
Please note that some sellers do not have an export permit or do not have an invoice for the purchase of goods and can only send parcels abroad worth up to 5,000 yuan (which is about 690 USD).
It’s quite simple: the accountant signed a contract with Meest Cargo, then we submitted a pickup request in China. I provided the dimensions and weight of the parcel I received from the seller, Meest Cargo calculated the shipping costs and sent me stickers for the parcel, and I forwarded them to the seller for them to apply. Pickup can be done through third-party delivery services, such as DHL. The courier comes and picks up the parcel from the seller. The seller must also provide a Packing List indicating the weight, dimensions, and contents of the box, the customs code for each item, and contact information: the sender’s phone number, email address, and warehouse address. If the parcel dimensions differ from those provided, the pickup request is amended and the courier is rescheduled. A Packing List and invoice with signatures must be attached to each parcel. The invoice must indicate FOP in the recipient’s name, otherwise the order may be cleared through customs to an individual, and the Private Identification number (TIN) must also be indicated. DHL may not accept products from certain brands, such as Huawei, if they see stickers with logos on the product. Upon arrival of the goods at customs, the broker handles the paperwork for the sole proprietor.
You may also need a Safety Data Sheet (SDS) for the product, which is often only available from the actual manufacturer, not the reseller. This is especially true if the equipment contains batteries, even CR2032 batteries for watches, as they can be detected by the scanner during inspection. Therefore, an SDS is required for air shipment.
When we ordered Huawei MCUD1 control boards from a reseller, it’s likely that only Huawei has an SDS, so we had to ask the seller to remove the CR2032 batteries from the equipment, and upon receipt, we simply soldered our own.
If you make a purchase through Meest Express rather than Cargo, for example, with door-to-door delivery (DDP) with customs duties paid upon shipment, the sale is usually made to an individual; according to the documents in China, the seller is Meest Express, regardless of whether the actual seller has an export limit of 5,000 yuan.
Payment for goods is made in USD directly to the verified seller’s invoice, as Alibaba, for example, won’t provide the required invoice format or contact information for their representative if there are any questions about the shipment. Some sellers in China have accounts with sanctioned banks and cannot accept SWIFT payments.