Most import problems are not exotic. They are the same six or seven failures, repeated across categories, and nearly all of them are decided before production starts.
Before You Ask For A Price
Write the specification down. Construction, material, weight, dimensions, colour reference, decoration, packing and the destination market. A quotation against a photograph is not a quotation; it is an opening position that will move.
Decide who the contracting party is. Buying from a UK or EU registered company is a different legal proposition from buying direct from an overseas factory, and it matters most in exactly the situation nobody plans for.
Sampling
Approve a physical sample, never a photograph and never a screen colour. Colour particularly cannot be approved on a screen; it has to be a physical reference under controlled light.
Retain samples. Two identical references, one at the factory and one with the supplier, and keep a third yourself. This is the control that makes a reorder reproducible, and it is the one most often skipped because it feels bureaucratic.
Before Production Runs On
Check the first production pieces against the retained reference before the line is allowed to continue. A drift caught in the first hundred pieces costs a morning. The same drift caught on the container costs the season.
Freeze the specification. After the freeze, changes happen as change orders with a cost and a revised date attached. What must not happen is a quiet substitution mid run because a material became unavailable.
Packing And Loading
Verify inner counts, outer counts, carton dimensions, marks and barcodes against the written packing specification. Scan a barcode from a real carton.
If several product groups share a container, agree the loading order. It matters when one group is going to a different depot from the rest, and it is trivial to arrange in advance and impossible to fix afterwards.
Documents And Timing
Commercial invoice, packing list and shipping documents have to match each other and match the goods. Discrepancies between them are a routine cause of delay at destination, and they are avoidable clerical errors.
Build the timeline backwards from the date the goods must be available, and put slack in it. Sea freight transit times move, and a promotion date does not.
The Reorder Is The Real Test
Any supplier can get the first order right, because everyone is paying attention. The second order, eighteen months later, with a different person at the factory and a different buyer at your end, is the one that tells you what the supplier is worth.
It only goes right if the product code is stable, the specification document still exists and the reference sample was retained. Those three things are the whole answer, and they are worth asking about before the first order rather than after the second.
