How much does a China sourcing agent cost in the UK?

The short answer, and why it is the wrong question

UK sourcing agencies that publish figures cluster in a narrow band. Commission runs roughly 5% to 15% of order value with most sitting at 5% to 10%; published guidance puts small orders under £10,000 at the top of that range and orders over £50,000 at 3% to 6%. Monthly retainers, where they exist, run about £800 to £3,000. Alongside those sit charges that are often quoted separately: samples at roughly £50 to £500 depending on complexity, quality inspections at £200 to £350 per man-day in China, and factory audits at £300 to £600. On a £20,000 order, a typical commission-based agent is therefore taking £1,000 to £2,000.

Those are the numbers, and every fee guide in this market repeats them. The trouble is that the fee is not where the money goes.

Two costs on a normal import are larger than any commission on that list, and neither appears in a single one of the competing articles. The first is margin taken inside the quoted unit price, which is invisible by construction. The second is import VAT you cannot reclaim, which on a £20,000 consignment is £4,000 — two to four times the commission you were negotiating over. Both are covered below, because comparing agents on headline fee while ignoring them is how buyers end up choosing the expensive option and feeling clever about it.

The three fee models, and what each one does to the agent

A visible service fee or retainer. You pay a stated amount for a stated scope. Its virtue is that it is legible: you can compare it, budget for it, and argue about it. Its weakness is that it is payable whether or not the sourcing works out, so the agent is paid for effort rather than for result.

A commission on order value. The dominant model, and the one with the problem nobody states out loud: the agent's income rises with your unit price. An agent on 8% earns £80 more every time your unit cost goes up by £1,000 across the order. This does not make commission agents dishonest, and plenty of good ones work this way. It does mean that the person advising you on whether a quote is good has a financial interest in the answer, and you should know that while you are reading their advice.

Margin inside the unit price. The agent quotes you £4.20 a unit, pays the factory £3.60, and keeps the difference without ever issuing a fee. This is the model that causes arguments, because from the outside it is indistinguishable from a £0 fee agency, and the only way to tell is to ask. It is also the model where the incentive is worst: every improvement the agent negotiates out of the factory can be kept rather than passed to you, and you will never see it happen.

None of the three is dishonest by itself. Concealing which one applies to you is. The single most useful thing you can do before signing anything is to ask, by email so you have it in writing, whether the agent receives any payment, commission or rebate from the supplier side. A direct answer tells you more than any published rate card.

The £4,000 nobody puts in the fee comparison

Here is the arithmetic that changes which agent is actually cheapest. Take a £20,000 consignment. Agent A charges 8% commission, so £1,600. Agent B charges nothing and arranges delivery duty paid, which sounds strictly better.

Now ask who is named as importer of record on the customs entry. If the answer is the agent or the freight forwarder rather than you, then you are not the importer of record and you generally cannot reclaim the import VAT on that consignment. At 20% that is £4,000 gone — not deferred, not recoverable later, simply not yours to claim. Agent B's £0 fee has cost you two and a half times Agent A's commission, and nothing on either quotation shows it. The mechanism and how to avoid it are set out in the DDP shipping VAT trap.

The same principle applies more quietly to duty. If nobody on your side is checking the commodity code used on the entry, you are paying whatever rate the agent's broker picked, and that is frequently not the lowest correct one. Finding your commodity code is a twenty-minute job that can be worth more than the whole fee negotiation, and our free import duty calculator will do the arithmetic for you.

So the comparison that matters is not fee against fee. It is total landed cost per sellable unit, with the VAT position stated, from each agent, on the same product. Understanding landed price sets out how to build that number so the quotes are actually comparable.

What the fee is supposed to buy

A fee is only expensive relative to what it covers, and scopes vary far more than rates do. Ask which of the following are inside the number you have been quoted and which are billed on top, because a 5% agent who charges separately for every audit, inspection and sample can easily cost more than a 10% agent who does not.

Supplier identification and verification — checking the company actually exists, actually manufactures, and is not a trading company presenting as a factory. Factory versus trading company explains why the distinction changes your price.

Specification and quotation management, meaning getting the same brief in front of several factories so the quotes you receive are genuinely comparable rather than three different products at three different prices.

Samples, including the handling and shipping of them, which is where separate charges most often appear.

Production oversight and pre-shipment inspection — somebody physically at the factory before the goods are packed, while there is still time to change the outcome. This is the line item most worth paying for and the one most often quietly subcontracted.

Freight, customs entry and delivery, and critically who is named on the entry.

Getting this list answered in writing takes one email and is the difference between comparing prices and comparing quotations.

What we charge, and why we can

We charge no sourcing fee, no commission and no retainer. Supplier vetting, factory audits, samples and quality control are included rather than billed separately, and you are quoted one landed price covering product, shipping and duty. The opening step is a free landed-price comparison against what you pay today, returned within 72 hours for a product you already buy; a custom or OEM product runs through our partner in China and takes about three weeks to quote properly.

The obvious question is how that works, and you are right to ask it, because "£0 fee" is exactly what a margin-inside-the-unit-price agency also says. Our answer is that we buy from Chinese factories for our own businesses and have done since 2021; the sourcing operation exists because we needed it, and taking on other UK companies uses capacity that is already there. We would rather be paid by clients who keep ordering than by a commission that makes us quietly prefer a higher unit price.

You should not take that on trust, and the check is the same one we recommend applying to everyone: ask us in writing whether we receive anything from the supplier side. The answer is no, and it is worth having in writing from us exactly as it is from anyone else. How the whole process works sets out each step, and our comparison of the UK agents names the alternatives, including where they are the better choice.

Is any of it worth paying

Often not, and it is worth saying so on a page published by an agency. If you are reordering a standard catalogue product from a supplier you have already used successfully, an agent adds cost and very little else. Do it yourself.

The fee earns its place in three situations. When the product is custom or made to your specification, because the gap between what you wrote and what arrives is where money is lost, and closing it needs somebody reading Chinese and standing in the factory. When it is a first import, because the compliance and customs work is unfamiliar and the mistakes in it are expensive and slow to unwind. And when something has already gone wrong, because at that point what you are buying is somebody in the right time zone with an existing relationship with the factory owner.

Do you need a China sourcing agent? works through that decision in more detail, and it reaches "no" more often than you might expect from a page on this website.