Dates last checked: 10 September 2026 against the organiser’s own announcement of the 140th session. Hall allocations and zone names move between editions — confirm on cantonfair.org.cn before you book anything. We don’t run the fair and we’re not affiliated with it.
Every guide to the Canton Fair tells you how to prepare for the halls: comfortable shoes, plenty of business cards, book the hotel early. All of it is true and none of it is where orders go wrong. Orders go wrong in the six weeks afterwards, when a shortlist of friendly exhibitors has to turn into one company you send money to. This page is about that part — what is in each phase, what tends to fail in each catalogue, and the two things we will do about it.
The three phases
Different catalogues, different failure modes.
The 140th session splits into three five-day phases with clear intervals between them. The halls are re-set completely each time, so the phase you attend decides what you see.
- Phase 1 — Advanced Manufacturing · 15–19 October 2026. Electronics, home appliances, machinery, hardware and tools, lighting, new energy vehicles, batteries and the service robots zone. The technical phase, where the risk is certification scope and component substitution.
- Phase 2 — Quality Home Life · 23–27 October 2026. Kitchenware and housewares, ceramics and tableware, furniture and building materials, décor, gifts and festival goods, fashion jewellery. The regulated phase, where the risk is food contact, formaldehyde and batch variation.
- Phase 3 — Better Life · 31 October – 4 November 2026. Toys, baby and maternity, apparel, footwear, bags, home textiles, stationery, food, pet products, intelligent healthcare. The high-liability phase, where the risk is safety testing and the consequence is a recall rather than a refund.
The intervals — 20–22 October and 28–30 October — are hall changeovers, not trading days. If you are attending more than one phase, they are the days worth spending on factory visits rather than on Guangzhou.
The free part
Send us one quote. We will tell you what it should cost.
You will come home with a price. What you won’t have is any way to tell whether it is a factory price, a factory price plus a trading company’s margin, or a number chosen because you arrived in a hurry on the last afternoon.
Send us one quote and we will tell you what that specification costs from a factory we have used. No fee, no obligation, and you do not have to buy anything from us to get the answer.
- What to send. The quoted price, the quantity, the incoterm, and enough of the specification to make it comparable — the material or model, the finish, and the destination market. Photographs of the quote sheet or the booth card are fine.
- What comes back. A price for the same specification at the same quantity, the incoterm it is quoted on, and a note on any point where your spec is ambiguous enough that two factories would price it differently. That ambiguity is usually where the gap comes from.
- One product per company. This is a comparison, not a sourcing project. If you want a whole catalogue priced, that is paid work and we will say so rather than quietly stretching the free offer.
Read this knowing what we are. Bolang is a trading company. If you end up buying through us, we earn a margin — so a comparison from us is not a disinterested opinion, and you should not treat it as one. That is exactly why we send the specification breakdown and the quantity the price is based on: so you can take our number to any other supplier and check it.
Sometimes the answer is that your quote is good. It happens often enough that we say so up front. A fair exhibitor who is genuinely the manufacturer, quoting a serious buyer, frequently gives a competitive price. When that is what we find, that is what we write, and the useful next step is verifying the company rather than re-shopping the price.
The paid part
Inspection, and what a day actually covers.
Every visit is quoted per request, because what moves the number is real: where the factory is, what the product is, and how much there is to check. What does not move is the unit. We price by the man-day, so a job that needs two or three days is visible in the quote rather than re-quoted afterwards, and you see the price and the date before you commit. Four kinds of day, all priced the same way:
- Pre-shipment inspection — the finished lot, sampled to a standard agreed in writing, before the balance is paid and while you still have leverage.
- During-production inspection — partway through the run, which is the only point at which a systemic problem can still be fixed rather than sorted.
- Container loading supervision — count, condition, carton marking and load, which is where a good order still becomes a bad delivery.
- Factory assessment — the facility, the lines, the systems and whether the company is what the booth implied.
- Rate Quoted per request, priced by the man-day — one inspector, at one factory, for one day. That is the same unit as a Bolang Factory Visit, priced by the day so that a job needing two or three days is transparent rather than re-quoted.
- Canton Fair rate 15% off, on inspections booked between 15 October – 30 November 2026 for goods sourced at the 140th session. Tell us that is where the supplier came from and we apply it.
- What a day covers One inspector, one factory, one product line, sampled to a standard agreed with you in writing before we travel. Photo-documented written report the same day or the next morning.
- Travel At cost where the factory is outside Guangdong, shown as separate lines rather than folded into the day rate.
What the rate does not include
Laboratory testing is not a man-day. Chemical and physical tests are run by an accredited laboratory and billed at the laboratory’s price. We arrange them and pass the invoice through without a markup, and we do not pretend an in-line check substitutes for one.
A failed inspection still costs a day. We are paid for going, not for a pass, which is the only arrangement under which a report is worth reading. Re-inspection after rework is a new day at the same rate — with one exception, which is our standard term everywhere on this site: if our own report was incomplete or we got something wrong, we go back at our cost.
We are not at the fair. We do not staff a booth, we will not meet you in the halls, and we are not going to walk Area B with you. We are two hours from Guangzhou in Huizhou, which is worth much more to you in the weeks after you fly home than in the five days you are there.
Before you go
The cheapest hour is the one before the flight.
Everything above is about the weeks after the fair, because that is where the money is decided. But the highest-return single hour in the whole exercise happens before you travel.
Send us the exhibitor list for the categories you care about and we will screen the registry entries in advance — who the legal entity is, what its registered business scope actually covers, and whether the company presenting as a manufacturer is one. You then walk the halls with a shortlist instead of building one. That is paid work, quoted against the list you send.
If you would rather do that part yourself, the method is written up in full and free on verifying a Chinese supplier on gsxt.gov.cn. It is genuinely doable without us, and we would rather you did it than skipped it.
Already home with a stack of cards? That is the more common situation, and it has its own page: Canton Fair supplier vetting covers what we check, what comes back, and what “unable to confirm” means.