Dealers who have a bad first experience sourcing from China almost never describe it as fraud when you ask them what went wrong. They describe a gap: a spec that wasn’t confirmed, a fee that wasn’t disclosed until after the deposit, a photo set that didn’t match the delivered unit closely enough to argue about. None of these are exotic problems. They are the same five or six gaps, repeating across almost every bad first order.
The checklist
1. Confirm the price basis in writing before any deposit. EXW, FOB, or DDP — and which currency. A quote that does not name its Incoterm is not a quote yet; it is a starting number that will move once you ask the follow-up question.
2. Get inspection media dated and VIN-matched, not generic. A photo set that could belong to any car of that model year is not an inspection. Ask for photos or video with the VIN or plate visible in at least one frame, timestamped within days of the quote — not stock catalog images.
3. Get the full landed-cost breakdown, not just EXW. Freight, destination duty, registration/compliance fees, and any agent or brokerage fee. A dealer who only locks EXW and estimates the rest is the dealer most likely to be surprised at the port.
4. Confirm battery certification separately for any EV or electric motorcycle unit. UN38.3 and MSDS documentation is what clears customs without a battery-related hold. This is not implied by a normal vehicle export document — ask for it explicitly and get it before shipment, not after a hold notice.
5. Know the payment schedule and what triggers each tranche. Deposit, balance-on-inspection-approval, balance-on-bill-of-lading — the safest structures release the largest tranche against a document or inspection milestone, not against a shipping date alone.
6. Ask what happens if the unit fails your own inspection on arrival. A supplier who has a clear answer to this before you ask it is a different category of counterparty than one who has never been asked. The absence of a policy is itself the answer.
Why this list, and not a longer one
Every item above maps to a documented failure mode, not a hypothetical one. Dealers rarely get burned by something exotic; they get burned by skipping a question they didn’t know to ask on their first order and knew to ask by their third. This list exists so that the third-order lesson is available before the first order, not after it.
What this means in practice
None of these six items should meaningfully slow down a quote from a legitimate sourcing partner — a supplier who can answer all six in the same conversation as the price is signaling operational maturity, not adding friction. A supplier who resists two or more of them, or treats them as unusual requests, is telling you something about the rest of the transaction before you have wired anything.
This report is maintained by UCarsea. Every quote we issue includes Incoterm, full landed-cost breakdown, VIN-matched inspection media, and battery certification where applicable, as standard — not as a special request. For a landed-cost quote on a specific model, tell us your target.