What does a sourcing agent's service process look like step by step?
Short Answer: Nine Stages From Brief to After-Sales, Designed So an Inspection Gate Sits Before Every Payment Release
A complete agent process runs roughly nine stages. You send a brief covering product, quantity, target price and specifications. The agent searches and verifies suppliers using the business licence, a video factory tour and a 1688 price benchmark. Samples are sourced and shipped for your approval. You sign the proforma invoice and pay a staged deposit. Production runs with a during-production inspection at around ten to twenty per cent completion. A pre-shipment inspection follows at eighty per cent or more, and you release the balance only if it passes. Goods then consolidate at the warehouse where they are labelled and packed. The agent books freight and prepares the export documents. Finally, after-sales support handles any claim. The design principle behind all of it is straightforward: an inspection gate sits before every payment release, so you always hold leverage at the moment it matters.
The Design Principle: Leverage Before Payment
Strip away the vocabulary and a sourcing process is a sequence of moments where you either have leverage or you do not. Once money leaves, leverage leaves with it. So the entire structure exists to place an inspection before every release of funds.
If an agent proposes a process where you pay in full before inspection, that is not a different style of working - it is the removal of the only mechanism that protects you.
Stages One to Three: Brief, Verify, Sample
You send the brief
Product, quantity, target price, specification.
Agent searches and shortlists
With reasoning for each candidate.
Supplier verification
Business licence, video tour, 1688 benchmark.
Samples sourced and shipped
Courier tracking shared.
You approve the golden sample
Retained and sealed for reference.
Stages Four to Six: PI, Production, Inspection
This is where most of the money and most of the risk live. The proforma invoice should carry the full specification, not a product name, because the PI is the document a factory will point at if there is a dispute.
| Stage | Trigger | Your protection |
|---|---|---|
| PI signed | Sample approved | Specification written into the PI |
| Deposit paid | PI countersigned | Staged, not full payment |
| In-line inspection | 10-20% complete | Catch systemic defects early |
| Pre-shipment inspection | 80%+ complete | Balance withheld until pass |
Stages Seven to Nine: Consolidate, Ship, Support
Consolidation is where an agent quietly earns a large part of their fee. Multiple suppliers, multiple carton sizes and multiple label requirements converge into one shipment, and doing it well removes both cost and customs friction.
What Each Gate Actually Catches
Case: The Gate That Paid for Itself
The in-line inspection at fifteen per cent found a stitching fault running through an entire component batch. Caught at that point it was a two-day rework on a partial run; caught at pre-shipment it would have been the whole order.
How RND SOURCING Runs the Process
We run this same door-to-factory workflow on every order, whether it is three Yiwu SKUs or a container of portable power stations, because the sequence is what makes the outcome repeatable. Verification happens before sampling, sampling before the PI, and the PI carries the full specification rather than a product name. We never book freight before pre-shipment inspection passes, and we never ask you to release balance on a report you have not read. Buyers sometimes ask to skip the mid-production gate to save a few hundred dollars - we push back, because in twelve years the gate has paid for itself far more often than not.
Walk through the process with usRelated Questions
- How do I vet a Yiwu-based sourcing agent?
- How does communication and project updates work with an agent?
- What is a pre-shipment inspection and do I need one?
- RM 1213, Block B Shuguang Mansion, No. 188 Shangcheng Avenue, Yiwu 322000, China
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