Product Inspections for Importers

Product Inspections are a must for every importer or private labeler/contract manufacturer. It is possible to outsource to independent inspectors, but typically we at Cascadia only work with accredited laboratories to perform product inspections.

In China, SE Asia, India, and Indonesia, we charge $309/man day flat rate, with a nominal travel surcharge for factory locations more than driving distance from one of our many provider locations. We do work in other regions upon request.

The concept with an inspection is that even with a very large shipment, you can be reasonably assured of knowing the overall quality of compliance through statistical measurement by randomly sampling a certain volume of product. Depending on your risk tolerance, you may dial that up or down. In most consumer goods, the AQL (Acceptable Quality Limit) is 0 critical, 2.5 major, and 4.0 minor failures, and your sample size is dependent on your risk tolerance as well, typically it’s General Level II.

Here are a few examples:

1) Shipment of 2500 chair covers – G-2, AQL 2.5/4.0 means 125 units will be inspected, and it will fail if 7 major failures are found, or 10 minor failures are found.

2) Shipment of 20,000 battery powered controllers – G-2, S-4, AQL 1.0, 2.5 means there will be two inspections, one general inspection and one special inspection. The special inspection will require 50 units be broken apart and the innards examined for loose welding or poor wiring methods. The General inspection will be 315 units, where 7 major failures mean the inspection doesn’t pass, and 10 minor failures.

So while the failures were the same 7/10, out of the total quantity, statistically, it’s a much tighter certainty of quality with 1.0/2.5 versus 2.5/4.0 AQL. For the second example inspection, there is a tolerance of up to 2% failure rate for the product – which is about standard for Amazon Retail, where there’s a built in 2% damage allowance for most vendors in their contractual agreement with Amazon. For the first item, not a wired product customers expect to last a while, the tolerance is up to 5.6% failure rate, because customers just don’t complain about textile covers as much. For an infant product (not a carseat), we might say half a percent overall failure rate is acceptable, in which case, we need something more like .4 or .65 AQL. To reiterate – AQLs are NOT percentages, they are measures of statistical likelihood.

Manufacturers will pretty much always try to exploit your naivete if you’re private labeling or importing and they know you have no checks in place. They may dump all the failures from the other inspections into your shipment or simply not remove any nonconforming product from your shipment. Our goal is to protect our clients from that negative experience – we’re helping to protect you and protect your brand, we know it can be tedious at times, but the process matters!

Please find below my handout on product inspections in your Amazon seller business!

What are Product Inspections?