About
A buyer-side sourcing practice, inside Chinese manufacturing
xcommerce is a technical sourcing practice based in Shenzhen. It represents West African importers — currently Nigerian — inside the Chinese supply base: finding the companies that genuinely manufacture, establishing what they really make, and getting quotations that mean something before anyone commits money.
It is not a trading company, not a freight forwarder, and not an agent for any factory. Clients contract and pay manufacturers directly.
Where the money comes from
Our only income is the fee the client pays us
Every other arrangement in this trade creates a reason to recommend the wrong factory. A commission paid by a supplier makes the recommendation an advertisement. Holding a client’s money makes the practice a counterparty rather than an adviser. Taking title to goods makes it a trader with a margin to protect. So none of those exist here, and each is stated as a specific negative rather than as a statement of values — because a specific negative can be checked and a value cannot.
- Commission from factories
- NilNone, on any order, at any time. We are not paid by the people we assess.
- Client funds held
- NilNone. The client pays the manufacturer directly, from their own account.
- Title to goods
- NilNone. We never buy or sell the product. We are not in your supply chain.
Why Shenzhen
Being in the same city as the supply base is the method, not an address
A sourcing practice that works remotely can read what suppliers send it. That is a different job, and it produces a different answer.
A factory can be visited
The question that settles whether a company manufactures is what is behind the gate, and whose licence is on it. That question is answered by going, at a day’s notice, for the cost of a train fare. From another continent it is answered by asking the supplier to describe itself.
The negotiation happens in Chinese
Specifications, business licences and quotations are written in Chinese, and the useful conversations are held in it. Translation is not a step at the end of the process here; it is how the information arrives, which means what a client reads is what the factory actually said rather than what its export desk chose to render into English.
Same working day as the factories
A question asked in Shenzhen at nine in the morning is answered before lunch. The same question sent from Lagos arrives after the factory has closed and is answered overnight, and a chain of six such exchanges takes a fortnight instead of two days. Most of the delay in remote sourcing is not the work; it is the gaps between the work.
The work
Verification before recommendation
Anyone can send a buyer a list of supplier links. The product here is knowing which of those companies actually manufactures, what they really make, what they actually quoted, and what the buyer has not been told.
- 01
Identify candidates
Build a shortlist of companies that plausibly make the product, from directories, trade sources and leads that surface during the work itself.
- 02
Establish who actually manufactures
Separate genuine factories from trading companies presenting as factories. This is a distinct step with its own evidence, and it removes companies from the list.
- 03
Verify the paperwork
Business licences and export entitlement, read in the original rather than in a supplier-supplied summary. The registered Chinese name is what gets checked, not the trading name on the website.
- 04
Collect and translate the specifications
Product documentation is gathered in Chinese and translated attribute by attribute, so a comparison is between fields rather than between brochures.
- 05
Compare against the requirement
Every specification is set against what the client actually asked for. Where a value is absent it is recorded as absent, never as a zero and never as a pass.
- 06
Obtain written quotations
At the client’s own volumes, on a stated incoterm, with a minimum order quantity, a lead time and a validity period. A price without those is recorded as indicative and labelled indicative wherever it appears.
- 07
Identify the costs behind the unit price
Docking, platform licences, cloud retention, network, freight, duty, certification. A device is one purchase in a system of them, and the cheapest unit frequently loses.
- 08
Recommend, with the evidence attached
Every finding in the client portal carries who checked it, when, and against which document. A recommendation the client cannot audit is an opinion.
The record so far
What the method has found
From the live engagement: a body-worn camera programme for a Nigerian client. These are counts and findings from that work, and they are the only figures on this site.
- 23
- Manufacturers identified and assessed
- 19
- Products captured and compared
- 244
- Specifications translated from Chinese
- One company disclosed, under direct questioning, that production actually sits with a different firm entirely — which produced a new manufacturer lead that no search had surfaced.
- Two separately listed companies resolved to the same firm by normalised web domain, which meant two apparently independent quotations were a single supplier quoting twice.
- Two models were found published with identical specifications under different part numbers.
- One quotation named two different chipsets for the same unit.
- Three prices arrived in chat messages with no minimum order quantity, no lead time and no validity period. They were recorded as indicative, not as quotations.
Not one of those findings would have appeared in a supplier list. Each came from asking a specific question and recording the answer against the document it contradicted.
Where we stop
What this practice does not do
Stating the limits precisely matters more than it might appear. A client who assumes the sourcing practice is also arranging the shipping will not arrange the shipping, and will discover it at the port. So the boundary is written down at the start of an engagement, and it is repeated wherever a reasonable person might assume otherwise.
What that leaves is a narrow job done properly: establishing the facts a buyer cannot establish from six thousand miles away, and handing them over with the evidence attached, so the decision — and the money — stays with the client.
Get in touch
Tell us what you are sourcing
Product, target volume and timeline is enough to start. We will tell you what would have to be verified before anyone could responsibly recommend a supplier to you.