gifts, promotional products and party supplies / Buying guide
How we check a booth before you pay
Checking a Yiwu booth is a different job from checking a 1688 seller, and most of the usual signals do not exist. There is no transaction count, no repeat-purchase rate and no star rating on a market stall.
What there is instead is physical presence, neighbours who have watched them trade for years, and the goods themselves sitting on the counter. That is what the check is built on.
In this guide
What replaces an online rating
- How long they have held the pitch. Booth tenancy in the International Trade City is expensive and competitive; a stall held for a decade is a stronger signal than any rating.
- What the neighbours say. Adjacent booths know who ships late and who substitutes, and they will tell an agent who is there every week.
- Whether they can name the factory. A booth that cannot say who makes what it sells is two removes from production, and every question you ask will get a guess.
- Whether the stock matches the catalogue. A booth photographing goods it has never held is common and visible in person.
What gets confirmed before an order
- The real minimum, which is frequently not the stated one, and whether it is per colour or per design.
- Whether the price quoted includes the packaging you saw or a plainer one.
- Lead time honestly stated — stock on the shelf against a production run, which are days apart or weeks apart.
- For anything printed: artwork proof, Pantone reference, and a first-article photograph before the run finishes.
Licensing, which is this category's specific risk
Yiwu carries an enormous volume of goods bearing licensed characters, sports clubs and brand marks without a licence. In party goods and gifts this is not a fringe problem — it is a large share of the most attractive-looking stock.
We do not buy it. If a design resembles a character or brand you recognise, the working assumption is that it is unlicensed, because the booth cannot produce a licence and the liability travels with the importer, not the seller.
Inspection at the warehouse
Mixed booth orders arrive as many small deliveries, and the count is the first thing that goes wrong — a booth shipping 180 against an order of 200 is ordinary. Everything is counted in full and photographed on arrival, against the written order.
Print position and colour are checked against the approved proof. Anything wrong is raised while the goods are still in Yiwu and still returnable to a booth we will be standing in front of next week — which is the real leverage here, and it does not survive export.
Questions & answers
Common questions
- Can you visit a specific booth I found?
- Yes, if you have a photograph, a district and an aisle number, or a business card. Those are the identifiers that work in the market.
- What if the count is short?
- It is raised before shipping, while we can still walk back to the booth. This is the main practical reason counting happens in Yiwu rather than on arrival.
- Do you inspect print quality?
- Against the approved proof, yes, on every printed order. It is the single most common defect in this category.
Your next step
Have a link you want checked?
Send a 1688 or Taobao product link and you get back the specification in English, the supplier check, and the landed cost to your country before you commit to anything.
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