The short answer is that anything and everything can go wrong.

Known defective products shipped, shipment dates missed without prior notice, factory payment collected without shipment having occurred, changes to BOM components without client approval … these are just some of the problems that are all to common.

It is a cultural reality that in China uncomfortable truths often don’t get communicated, even when they are vital information. This can take the form of inaccurate answers to tough questions or things that go unsaid that shouldn’t be. It is common in China to focus on “saving face” rather than identifying and solving problems earnestly. Sometimes the answers given are convenient answers aimed at creating false comfort and avoiding conflict, or they just push the issue downstream without focus on identifying and solving the problems. This practice can turn small issues into large problems, resulting in subsequent mistakes which complicate matters and cost time and money. During the early stages of a project, these issues can drastically hamper execution in getting a product to market in a timely basis.

P2P operates in a “Strait talk” fashion with our factory and our clients, and we teach our factories to work in a straight talk fashion with us.  As a result, we prevent you from having to deal with delays, expenses and missed opportunities that often result. Sometimes things will go wrong on projects, and P2P can identify and resolve them quickly and decisively because we are face-to-face on site, and we understand the culture. We train our factories to deal in straight talk with us by going to see with our own eyes at the factory what is going on with your project, confirming the facts and modelling the transparency we expect. Our decades of experience and being face-to-face enables us to push back on unacceptable answers, know when to escalate matters upstream, and having relationships with factory leadership which allow us to do so effectively.

Finally, all shipments pass our final quality assurance inspection before the order can ship out of the factory and before you need to pay the balance payment to us. We guarantee that the product you receive will be the product you ordered.  If you don’t have your own savvy on-site representation in Asia, like P2P, you run the risk of finding out about shipment problems when they arrive defective on your dock, and you have no recourse to resolve them.