What to Check Before Buying Furniture From China

Most problems with Chinese furniture orders do not appear in the showroom. They appear eight weeks later, when a container is opened and the foam has collapsed, the veneer is lifting, or the sofa does not meet the fire regulation your retailer quietly assumed it met. Almost every one of those problems was visible in a document or a sample — it simply was not checked.

This is the checklist we run before placing a purchase order, written from the buyer's side of the table. It applies to upholstery, case goods and mixed containers.

1. The supplier is a legal entity, not a WeChat account

Start with paperwork that can be checked independently.

• Business licence — confirm the legal name, unified social credit code, registered capital, establishment date and registered business scope
• Production address — an industrial-zone address that matches the licence, not a sales office
• Export record — customs data or shipment references, ideally to your own market
• Bank account name — it must match the licensed company name. A payment request to a personal account or a third-party company is a stop sign, not a convenience.

2. Panel material: the substitution you will not see

In case goods, the carcass is where cost is quietly removed. Ask for the exact board type and grade, then verify it in the sample.

For North America, ask specifically for CARB Phase 2 compliant panels and the corresponding test report. For Europe, E1 as a minimum, E0 where your buyer requires it. A supplier who cannot produce the report for the exact board they are using has not verified anything.

3. Foam, frames and the parts you cannot see

For upholstery, the specification that matters is inside the cover.

• Seat foam density — 35 kg/m3 or above for residential seating that must hold shape; below 30 kg/m3 and you should expect visible collapse within a season of daily use
• Frame timber — kiln-dried hardwood at 8 to 12 percent moisture content; unseasoned wood warps after it crosses a climate zone
• Joints — dowel plus cam, corner blocks, and glued and stapled corners rather than staples alone
• Suspension — sinuous springs or webbing fixed to a solid rail, with a barrier cloth so the frame does not wear through the foam
• Fabric performance — Martindale rub count appropriate to the use: roughly 20,000 for light domestic, 30,000 and above for contract and hospitality

4. Hardware tells you the price tier

Hinges, runners and fittings are a reliable signal. A supplier using branded hardware — Blum, Hettich, DTC, Hafele — is generally building to an export standard, because those components are specified by buyers who have been burned before. Unbranded hinges on a quote that claims premium positioning is a contradiction worth questioning.

Check soft-close function, load rating on drawer runners, and whether the hinge plate is fixed with machine screws into a proper insert rather than directly into the board edge.

5. Finish quality is measurable

Ask what the finish system is: nitrocellulose, polyurethane, or water-based. Water-based systems have become common for export because of VOC limits in destination markets. Then ask how adhesion is tested.

A cross-hatch adhesion test, rated on the 0 to 5B scale, is a five-minute check you can do yourself on a sample with a blade and tape. A finish that lifts at 3B will not survive a retail floor.

6. Compliance for your market, not for China

This is where the most expensive surprises live, because a product can be perfectly made and still be unsellable.

Ask for the test report number, the laboratory, the date, and the exact product it covers. A report for a different fabric or a different foam grade does not cover your order.

7. Packaging decides the landed condition

Domestic Chinese packaging assumes a short truck journey to a domestic retailer. Export packaging assumes a container, humidity, and two or three transshipments.

• Five-layer corrugated carton, with a printed mark showing model, quantity, carton number and destination
• EPE or moulded foam at corners and edges, not thin bubble wrap alone
• Corner protectors on case goods, and internal bracing so panels cannot shift
• Moisture absorber inside the carton for sea freight
• Drop and stack test results, or a supervised test on the first production run

8. Commercial terms worth negotiating

• Incoterms — FOB is the norm in Foshan; CIF is convenient but hides the freight margin; EXW leaves you responsible for export clearance
• Payment — 30 percent deposit and 70 percent against a passed inspection is standard and reasonable. Treat a demand for full payment before production as a risk signal.
• Inspection clause — write the AQL level and the remedy into the order confirmation, not into a later email
• Warranty — 12 months on structure and foam is common; get the replacement mechanism in writing, including who pays freight
• Tooling and moulds — if you paid for a mould or a custom fabric dye lot, state that it remains your property

Red flags that justify walking away

• The quotation arrives without a single question about your specification
• The factory address changes each time you ask for it
• Test reports are offered as "similar product" documents
• Payment is requested to a personal or unrelated company account
• The sample is excellent and the price is below the market floor — one of those two facts is not true
• No golden sample, no inspection access, no photographs from the line

How GAVIN handles this

We run this checklist on every order we place, because the cost of a substitution discovered at destination is always higher than the cost of checking it at the factory. For buyers who cannot be in Foshan, that means specification review, factory verification, sample retention, in-line and pre-shipment inspection, and photographs from the production floor at each stage.

Send us the product you are considering and the market you sell into. We will tell you which items on this list are the real risks for that specific product — and what it costs to close them.