Buy Cosmetics from Yiwu, China.
--- Only tips this time.
Tips for Buy Cosmetics from Yiwu China
Instead of offering you price, quality, MOQ, here i only want to share with you one tip for buying cosmetics from Yiwu, China, as a warning.
Cosmetics requite a export inspection certificate, same as jewelry, ceramics... If the vendor/factory can not provide this certificate, your agent has to buy such a certificate, or they just don't declare this and pay customs broker a "special" fee.
If with good luck, the container goes out untouched, this "special" fee goes to the customs broker's pocket. If unfortunately, the container gets caught up and inspected through customs, the customs broker will have to have "special" ways to get this container through by paying a fine (or bribing customs people).
So there is still a way for normal cosmetics.
But here i want to talk more of products like nail polish, nail oil, lips gloss, perfumes... any liquid cosmetics packed in bottles that are considered flammable,easy to evaporate and can cause explosion. These products are considered as "hazardous products".
Normally, hangdogs products require safe packing to be shipped out. Usually the factories need to obtain a export inspection certificate for these products to prove that their products are safe or are safely packed. But in order to have factories offer this certificate, buyers are usually require to buy big quantity - one container or half a container. Obviously, not every buyer can fill up a container of nail polish.
A way most Yiwu suppliers / agents using is simple - they just mix these products together with other products, pay customs a "special" fee, then get them shipped out without any declaration.
They can ship out these products without any problems through China customs, but this doesn't mean buyers can receive these products without any problems during their customs clearance.
Sure, many buyers still can get their products in this way through customs clearance with or without "special" costs. But this is not a 100%-no-problem deal.
Buyers still need to talk to their customs agents before any decisions are made in such circumstances. The worst thing would be buyers ship a container of "hazardous products" into their port without declaration and caught up by customs...
A sheer nightmare that can not wake up easily.
A True Story
Unfortunately, such an unhappy story happened to us a few weeks ago.
One of our South Africa customers came to Yiwu and ordered some cosmetics, including nail polish and nail oil. We had no experiences of shipping cosmetics before(this was made clear with the first email i sent to this customer), but our customer told us he bought from Yiwu before. So i thought "that will be fine!"
Unfortunately, when we were talking about the shipping, i called our shipping forwarder, he said they could not ship out nail polish... "what?!" I got stuck there immediately.
Afterwards, i found out that our customer indeed bought from Yiwu before, but they didn't involved directly in importing. So they don't know anything about shipping cosmetics to South Africa!
Obviously, he chose a safe option not to bring them in without clear idea of what's the risk. So in the later days, lost of sad emails back and forth between our customer and us...
Till today, no conclusion about how to proceed with his orders. For whatever stocks ordered, we had to candle all of them. Our customer spent cost and time for coming to Yiwu, we spent also lots of time.
The only good thing is we stopped a worse nightmare in advance. We're very honest and frank to each other.
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