EXW, FOB or DDP From China — What Each One Actually Costs You
Two quotes ten per cent apart are frequently the same price wearing different Incoterms.
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.
An Incoterm is not a shipping preference. It is the line that decides who pays for each leg, who carries the risk when something is damaged, and who is legally the exporter and the importer. Comparing two quotes without normalising it is comparing two different purchases.
EXW — everything is yours from the factory door
The lowest headline number and the most work. You are responsible from the moment the goods are available at the factory, including inland transport, export handling and China-side export clearance.
The part that surprises people: a foreign company generally cannot complete Chinese export clearance in its own name. You need an entity in China to do it, which means EXW almost always converts into “EXW plus an agent’s fee” — a cost that is real, is not in the quotation, and is the reason EXW so often stops looking cheapest once totalled.
FOB — the workhorse, and where the risk actually transfers
The seller delivers the goods, cleared for export, onto the vessel at a named port. It is the most common term in China trade for good reason: the factory handles the domestic leg and the export paperwork, which it is set up to do, and you control the ocean freight and everything after, which is where the choice of forwarder actually matters.
Risk transfers at the ship’s rail. Damage in the yard before loading is the seller’s; damage at sea is yours, which is what cargo insurance is for — and it is bought by whoever carries the risk, not by whoever booked the freight.
DDP — convenient, opaque, and the one to read carefully
The seller delivers to your door with duty paid. For a small importer without a customs broker this is genuinely attractive, and for low-value samples it is often the sensible choice.
The honest warning: duty is being paid by someone, against a declared value, in your name as the importer of record in most markets. If a DDP quote is dramatically cheaper than the duty arithmetic suggests it can be, the most common explanation is an under-declared value — and the liability for a false declaration generally lands on the importer, not on the supplier who arranged it. Ask to see the entry documents. A supplier who will not show you what was declared on your behalf has answered the question.
Common questions
FOB suits most importers with any volume: the factory does what it is good at, you keep control of the freight leg and the customs entry. DDP is defensible for small or sample shipments where you have no broker, provided you see the declaration.
Close, and the difference matters. Under CIF the seller arranges freight and a minimum level of insurance, but risk still passes at loading — so you carry the risk on a policy someone else chose. Read the cover before relying on it.
We state the Incoterm on every quotation rather than leaving it implied, because a price without one is not a price. Which term we recommend depends on the goods, the destination and whether you have a broker.
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