The Factory Raised the Price Mid-Order
Deposit paid, production booked, and an email arrives saying material costs have moved.
Bolang Solutions is a trading company. We chose the model on purpose: it lets us buy across many factories instead of selling you one production line, inspect goods we don't manufacture, and put our own name on every export document as seller of record. The industry's trading-company horror stories are concealment stories — so we run the opposite playbook: registered scope public, address public, and a standing invitation to verify us on gsxt.gov.cn the same way we verify suppliers.
On shipments we trade, the commercial invoice, packing list and bill of lading carry Bolang as seller of record. One counterparty, legally on the hook, answering in English.
Verify us the way we verify suppliers — our registered name, address and Unified Social Credit Code are published on this site; look us up on gsxt.gov.cn.
This is one of the few supplier problems where the honest answer is sometimes “they are right”. Treating every mid-order increase as bad faith gets you a worse product at the old price, because a factory squeezed below its cost finds the savings somewhere you did not specify.
Four things it usually is
1 · A genuine input move. Steel, resin, paper, cotton and freight all move, sometimes sharply. This is real and it is checkable.
2 · Quoted low to win the order. The number was never achievable; the increase arrives once you are committed and your tooling is on their floor. The tell is timing — it lands after the deposit rather than before.
3 · Specification drift. Somewhere between quotation and production the spec changed — a thicker gauge, a better finish, a tighter tolerance, often something you asked for in an email nobody priced. This one is frequently mutual and is resolved by re-reading the thread rather than by arguing.
4 · Exchange rate. If you are quoted in USD and their costs are in RMB, a rate move changes their margin without changing their price. Whether that is your problem depends on what the contract says about currency, which is usually nothing.
What to ask for
Ask which specific input moved, by how much, and what proportion of the unit cost it represents. A factory dealing straight can answer all three, because they had to do the arithmetic to write you the email. A factory that quoted low to win tends to answer in generalities about “the market”.
Then check the claim against a published index for that material. You do not need a subscription or a data service — you need to know whether the direction and rough magnitude are plausible. An input that has moved a few per cent does not support a large increase on a finished good where that input is a minority of the cost.
Therefore, the useful question is not “is this fair” but “does this arithmetic work”. It is answerable, it is unemotional, and it moves the conversation to ground where being right is worth something.
Running the test, both ways
The questions above only help if you know what a good answer looks like next to a vague one. Here is the same increase, tested twice. The figures are illustrative — they show the shape of the arithmetic, not any particular order.
A factory asks for 8% more on a finished product, citing the cost of its main raw material.
Where the arithmetic closes. They tell you the material is about 40% of the unit cost and has moved about 20%. Forty per cent of twenty is eight, so the increase matches the input. They can name the grade, say when it moved, and tell you what happens to the price if it moves back. Therefore what is left to negotiate is timing and sharing, not whether the number is real.
Where it doesn’t. They tell you the market has gone up, and name nothing. Or they name an input that is 5% of the unit cost and has moved 10% — which supports half a per cent, not eight. That gap, between what the input supports and what is being asked for, is the whole conversation.
Therefore the number to argue about is the share, not the increase. A factory that quoted honestly can tell you what proportion of the unit cost each input represents, because they had to know it to quote you in the first place.
Common questions
They can certainly decline to ship, which amounts to the same pressure. This is why where your tooling physically sits and what your contract says about it matter more than they seem to at the start — see tooling ownership.
Sometimes yes, and there is no shame in it if the increase is small and the reasoning holds. What is worth avoiding is paying without asking, because an increase accepted in silence establishes that increases can be announced rather than negotiated.
It moves who absorbs it. Where we have quoted you a price and the input moves, that sits between us and the factory rather than landing in your inbox mid-order. We are a principal, so that exposure is genuinely ours — which is also why our quotes are confirmed in writing with a validity stated on them.
Related
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