The right distributor, online and offline. And the team that keeps them honest.

BeyondCompass, our partner database. Fifteen years of in-person meetings across our offices in China, Hong Kong, Paris and our reps across every major consumer category we ship. Most sourcing firms hand you a scraped 1688 export and call it a curated list. We hand you a shortlist of partners we know by name, met last quarter, and would put our reputation behind. That is the entire difference.

Three to five months. Scoping in week one, longlist by week four, shortlist interviews through weeks five to eight, due diligence and negotiation through weeks nine to sixteen. Brands that take longer usually got stuck on NMPA or SAMR work they should have started earlier.

Sometimes. More often you end up with two or three, split by channel (offline versus online) or by region (north versus south versus west). National exclusivity gets granted only against hard volume commitments. Brands that signed full national exclusivity without those clauses are the ones who get stuck for three years.

Niche is where BeyondCompass actually earns its keep. Generic sourcing firms only know the top thirty distributors in beauty and F&B. For pet wellness, premium kitchenware, niche supplements or specialised B2B, the right partner might be the eighty-third name on a list and the only one who will say yes. We have those names. They are not on the public internet.

No. We bill you on the engagement. The distributor does not pay us referral fees. That is deliberate and it is written into the contract. If we took commission, our incentive would flip toward closing a deal instead of finding the right partner. Some clients ask. We are glad they do.

Both, eventually. Beauty often starts online and pulls offline once volume justifies it. F&B usually starts offline and adds Tmall Global later. Premium lifestyle goes both at once. The right distributor profile depends on which surface you lead with. We work this through in scoping before any longlist gets pulled.

Usually no, not in year one. A flagship costs around RMB 150k to set up plus deposits, plus a Tmall Partner agency at RMB 30k to 80k per month, plus media. Distributors with existing Tmall accounts run more efficient stores at first. Open your own when annual GMV passes RMB 10M and you need direct control over data, pricing and CRM.

CBEC (cross-border via Tmall Global and JD Worldwide) is faster. No NMPA registration for cosmetics, simpler labelling, lower duties on personal-use orders. Most brands use it as the test bed. General trade is required for offline retail and serious scale. The usual path: CBEC first, layer general trade once volumes justify the registration work.

You do not, directly. Regional distributors do, and that is exactly why distributor partnerships exist. Tier-1 city tier (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen) is one game. Tier-2 (Hangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan) is another. Tier-3 needs a different partner with a different cost structure. A national distributor that claims tier-3 coverage but only services tier-1 is a common red flag we catch in diligence.

Channel-split exclusivity in year one. Offline to distributor A, online to distributor B or to us. Full national exclusivity gets granted only against hard volume commitments and clear performance milestones. Brands that signed national exclusivity without those clauses are the ones who get stuck for three years.

First order: 100% prepaid against pro-forma invoice, sometimes a letter of credit for larger volumes. Once a year of clean trading is on record: 30% deposit, 70% on shipment, or net 30 to 60 days. Open account 90 days only with distributors we know well. Currency is USD or EUR almost always. RMB invoicing is rare for imports.

Beauty and supplements: EUR 30k to 80k for a serious distributor to take you on. F&B: usually EUR 50k and up, depending on shelf life and pallet size. Anything below EUR 20k means the distributor is treating you as a test. Fine in itself, but the support level will match.

Read-only access to the Tmall and JD backends, written into the contract, not optional. Cross-check with an independent platform tracker like Magic Mirror for category sell-through. Physical store visits twice a year, minimum. If a distributor refuses backend access, walk away.

We flag it early through monthly reviews if you are on a Source-and-stay engagement. If the numbers do not recover, we run a replacement sourcing. Brands that wait too long on a weak partner lose more than brands that change. BeyondCompass keeps replacement candidates current, so the next round usually moves faster than the first.

You shrink them, you do not eliminate them. Tight price control in your home market, batch tracking, takedown service on Taobao and Xianyu for unauthorised listings, customs alerts at China entry points. Budget RMB 80k to 200k a year for monitoring if the category is exposed. Premium beauty, supplements and wine see the most parallel flow.

Roughly two hours a week from your project lead during Phases 1 to 3. Three or four working sessions of half a day each across the engagement. Heavier through the interviews and the negotiation, because you sit at the table. We do the heavy lifting on research, longlist work and diligence.

You do, under your own name. Always. Never let a distributor register your trademark, even temporarily. China is a first-to-file market and trademark squatting is a real business. File in classes 3, 5, 29, 30, 35 and 43 depending on category, before any commercial activity, before any trade show, before any social mention.

Written into the contract upfront. Standard buyback clause: the brand or the new distributor buys back unsold stock at landed cost, minus reasonable depreciation. Without this clause, the outgoing distributor can dump product at any price or hold inventory hostage to block your relaunch. Negotiate it on day one.

Source-and-step-back: a project fee, typically EUR 40k to 90k for a single-category, single-channel brief. Quoted in the first call once the brief is clear. Source-and-stay: project fee plus a monthly retainer, retainer scales to scope, usually RMB 40k to 150k. No commission from distributors, ever.

Almost never in year one. Going direct means setting up a WFOE in Shanghai or Hong Kong (4 to 6 months, EUR 30k to 80k in setup), hiring a local GM, building warehouse relationships and absorbing the full risk. The breakeven sits around EUR 8M to 12M of annual China revenue, when distributor margins start to cost more than running your own operation. Below that, the distributor network and capital are cheaper than your own team.