Wait until the inspection passes to book. Look into a during production inspection if you are in a hurry.
Coordinating with Pre-Shipment Inspections
A pre-shipment inspection is designed to be your last line of defense before your products reach your customers. You'll want to wait until you've received a passed inspection result (in your opinion), before booking your freight forwarder. This is because:
- Upon inspection completion, the factory will need some time to repackage opened units.
- If the inspection fails, the factory will need to check the entire production batch and fix all identified issues. Once done, you'll want to do what's called a re-inspection.
Re-Inspections: If your first inspection failed and you've asked your factory to repair the entire production batch, shipping your order without a re-inspection tells your factory:
- You are not experienced, and you do not understand the inspection process. This is a standard procedure followed by small businesses to all Fortune 500s.
- There is no process to hold the supplier accountable (i.e. they can routinely produce defective products, pretend to fix them, and ship with no repercussions).
- Booking freight before the inspection results arrive can indicate to your factory that the inspection result and the quality of products do not matter, especially on your first order.
That said, you should notify your freight forwarder with an approximate shipping date. However, you should not set it in stone.
In a hurry?
If you are in a hurry, look into our during production inspections. These are done between 20-80% of production completion. In most cases, we do not check the shipping cartons or product packaging. That said, we do check finished products and ensure they are up to standards before your order has finished production which can save time when shipping.
You can also opt to do a pre-shipment inspection before 100% of the products are ready. If you choose to do this, please coordinate a date in advance with your factory and notify us accordingly. We will check to make sure agreed-upon units are ready to go (i.e. 90%), and conduct the rest of the inspection as normal. The biggest risk of this is that we will not be able to randomly sample from the unfinished units, so there is no way to verify the quality standards of those units before shipping.