Import from China to India: which checks are yours, and which one is ours.

Three registrations that must exist on your side before anything ships

IEC — Importer Exporter Code. Issued by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT). Without it a commercial import cannot be cleared in your name. It is a one-time registration, and it comes first among the requirements below.

GST registration. Import IGST is paid at clearance and claimed as input credit afterwards, which only works if the registration is in place and the invoice details match it.

AD Code registration. Your bank issues an Authorised Dealer code, and it has to be registered at the specific port through which your consignment arrives. This is the step first-time importers most often discover late, because nothing earlier in the process asks for it. A consignment sitting at a port waiting for an AD Code registration accrues demurrage while you sort it out.

Confirm all three with DGFT, your GST practitioner and your bank respectively, the requirements are theirs to state, not ours. What we can tell you is that none of them says anything about whether the company at the other end of the transaction is real.

Whether your product needs BIS, and why that certificate points at the Chinese factory

India brings products under mandatory certification through Quality Control Orders (QCOs). Where a QCO covers your product, it must carry the ISI mark and the manufacturer must hold a BIS licence before the goods can enter the market. Products outside any QCO do not need it.

One part matters for supplier selection. For goods made abroad, BIS certification runs through the Foreign Manufacturers Certification Scheme: the scheme is, by its name and design, addressed to the overseas manufacturer. So when a Chinese supplier sends you a BIS certificate, that document is about a Chinese manufacturing entity. It is not about you, and it is not automatically about the company that will issue your invoice.

That is where two very ordinary situations start to look identical on paper. In the first, the factory holds the licence and its trading arm invoices you — entirely normal. In the second, a trading company forwards a certificate belonging to a factory it merely buys from, and your compliance file now rests on a document about someone else. Both look the same in an email. They differ in whether the name on the certificate matches the name on your contract, your invoice and your payment instruction, and those names are checkable.

Scope and dates change, and they are not ours to state. A QCO for household, commercial and similar electrical appliances has been reported as taking effect from 1 October 2026, covering 90-plus categories. We have that from trade press rather than from BIS directly, so treat it as a prompt to check, not as the answer. Whether your specific product is covered, and by which order, is a question for BIS or a certification consultant.

Duty, HS classification and clearance: not our lane, and not a guide’s either

“Import duty from china to india” is the single most searched question around this topic, and it is the one no general guide should answer with a number. The rate depends on the tariff classification of your specific product and on the measures in force on the day of entry. Add any anti-dumping or safeguard duty applying to that line. All three move.

Ask your customs broker for a landed-cost estimate against the actual HS code. Treat the classification itself as a decision worth getting right early. The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs is the authority on it; a supplier’s quotation carries no such authority. A supplier telling you the duty rate is a supplier guessing about your country.

We do not clear customs, we do not quote freight, and we do not calculate duty. A page that pretended otherwise would be the least useful thing on this site.

The China-side check that is actually ours

Everything above is about India. This part is not, and it is the part your broker, your CA and your freight forwarder all leave to you.

A Chinese company exists in a state register under one exact Chinese name and one 18-character Unified Social Credit Code. The English name on an Alibaba storefront, an email signature or a proforma invoice (a draft invoice used to confirm the deal before you pay) is a trading style. It is not registered and cannot be searched. So the first question is mechanical. Does the name and code they gave you resolve to a live registered entity, and is that entity registered for the activity you are buying?

The second question is the one that decides whether your money is recoverable. Does the bank account you have been asked to pay belong to that same registered company? When the beneficiary is a different company, an individual, or an account in a third jurisdiction, that is not automatically fraud. But it is always something to resolve before the wire, because an international transfer is not reversible on request.

Both checks return a record with a source and a query date. Neither is an opinion about whether the supplier is good to work with.

The two steps you cannot take back

The deposit. Once an international wire lands, your leverage is whatever the contract and the relationship give you, and on a first order that is usually very little. Everything you intend to verify about the counterparty should happen before this, not after.

Tooling and moulds. Paid separately, often to the same account, and frequently the largest single sum on a first project. Establish who owns the tooling in writing before it is cut.

If a supplier explains a beneficiary mismatch with urgency, a frozen account, a year-end audit, a “temporary” alternative — treat the urgency itself as the reason to slow down.

What this page deliberately does not tell you

Which products are profitable to import. That is a market question about your channel and your margins, and anyone answering it from a distance is guessing. What can be put a number on is the flow itself: Chinese customs export values to 253 destinations, India among them, for the first half of 2026. That sizes a lane without saying anything about your margins.

Duty rates, freight quotes and transit times. Country-specific, date-specific, and better sourced from your broker and forwarder this week than from any guide.

Whether the goods will be any good. No register holds product quality. It comes from an approved sample and an inspection against a written specification.

Whether a certificate is genuine. We verify the Chinese entity named on it against the Chinese public record. Confirming that a BIS licence is live and covers the product is a question for BIS.

Before the transfer: the four names, and why BIS makes this sharper in India

Every importer has to answer one question that no customs broker and no sourcing agent will answer for them. Who exactly am I paying, and is that the same party I contracted with? Put four names side by side, literally as written, before any deposit leaves:

We publish our own weakness here and not a market-size pitch. India is China’s sixth-largest export destination and growing at 21.8% year on year, and this page was seen nine times in twenty-eight days, at an average position of 45. Position 45 is page five. So treat what follows as a reference you found, not as something the market has already vetted. The checks it describes stand on the registry records they cite, not on our visibility.

A mismatch is not proof of fraud. It is routine for a mainland factory to invoice through an affiliated trading company, often a Hong Kong one. There is a structural reason for it: across all 264 registered Chinese manufacturers checked, 25.4% carried no import-export wording in their registered business scope. One in four cannot straightforwardly export in its own name, so the money goes to a different legal person. What matters is whether that relationship was disclosed and documented before the price was agreed.

Where India differs. If your product falls under BIS certification, you now have a fifth name to align. A BIS certificate under the Foreign Manufacturers Certification Scheme is issued against a named foreign manufacturer at a specific factory address, not against whoever sells to you. So the entity on the certificate, the entity on your contract and the entity receiving your payment can legitimately be three different companies. It is your job to see that they connect. A certificate that names a factory you are not contracting with does not cover your consignment.

Free tool that runs the comparison in your own browser and transmits nothing: four-party comparison. To confirm the registered identity behind any of those names: how to search the Chinese registry, or check an 18-character code locally with the USCI check-digit tool.

Registry answers age. In the same 264-company census, 54.9% amended their registration within twelve months: a check from last quarter does not support today's transfer. We do not apply for BIS, calculate duty, clear customs or confirm bank-account ownership. Those sit with BIS, your customs broker and your bank respectively.

If you already have a supplier in front of you

Ask for a photograph of the business licence (营业执照) to get the exact registered Chinese name and the 18-character code. Then check them against the public record rather than against the document you were sent. It takes minutes and it is the cheapest step in the whole sequence.

Run the free registry check

Every line we deliver names its source and the date it was queried, and states what it cannot show. We verify records. We do not certify suppliers, and we are not a substitute for a customs broker, a certification body or legal advice.