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Payment decision

What payment structure should you use before you pay a Chinese supplier?

Before the money leaves your account, spend five minutes confirming you have not skipped a step you cannot undo. Choose the three answers below and the tree returns the structure to insist on, the terms to get written down, and the signals that mean stop.

Your payment structure

Three answers. Nothing is stored.

Order amount
Where is the supplier?
Order type

Last evidence review: October 2, 2026

Short answer

Who wrote this, and how we get paid

This matters because it tells you whose interests this page is written to serve.

  1. We do not make payments for you and we never hold your funds. Any structure below is executed between you, your supplier and your own bank or escrow provider.
  2. We take no commission or rebate from suppliers, marketplaces, freight forwarders or inspection companies.
  3. Our revenue comes only from fees paid by buyers.
  4. If our recommendation conflicts with your supplier's recommendation, that is expected. We sit on the buyer's side of the table.

Product position: buyer-side only. This page does not sell, recommend or rank suppliers, and it holds no buyer funds.

How to read thisThree answers produce one structure. The tree never averages across bands — a $4,000 order and a $40,000 order do not get the same answer, and a custom order is treated differently from a stock item at every level.
Why the boundaries matterMost payment losses are not fraud. They are orders that were never defined well enough to argue about, paid through a rail that was never asked to check anything.

The four things a marketplace guarantee does not resolve

Trade Assurance is a transaction rail. It is not a quality guarantee and it is not arbitration for every disagreement. These four dispute types are where buyers most often assume protection that is not there:

  • Quality disputes. A delivered product that is legal, as-described in a loose PI and simply not very good is a specification problem, not a payment-protection problem. The fix is acceptance criteria in the PI, before the deposit.
  • Late delivery that is still delivery. A shipment that arrives late but does arrive is generally a contract-performance question, not a "goods never shipped" claim.
  • Specification changed privately. If a change was agreed in a chat or a call and never written into the order, the platform order still describes the old specification.
  • Partial shipment or short shipment. A delivery that is incomplete against a PI that never quantified the full quantity precisely is hard to argue as a breach.

Boundaries cross-checked against Alibaba.com's published Trade Assurance money-back policy and payment guidance. Platform terms and eligibility change — check the terms attached to your specific order.

What a wire actually isA T/T is an instruction to move money, not a container that holds it. Your bank confirms the transfer was executed; it does not inspect goods, hold funds against conditions, or arbitrate a dispute afterwards.

What a bank wire does and does not do

A T/T (telegraphic transfer) is a payment instruction, not an escrow. Your bank moves funds to the beneficiary account you name and confirms whether the transfer was executed. It does not inspect goods, does not hold funds until conditions are met, and does not arbitrate a commercial dispute with your supplier afterwards.

That is the whole reason payment structure matters: with a plain wire, every protection you get is one you wrote into the contract beforehand. Once the balance is gone, your remaining leverage is a legal claim in a jurisdiction you probably did not choose.

Next step

If the tree returned 30/40/30 or anything involving third-party control, work through the checklist before you approve the payment. If the tree returned a stop condition, resolve that first — the checklist will not help while a red flag is open.

Get the pre-payment checklist

How to negotiate 30/40/30 with your supplier

Primary sources

This page states structural and contractual facts. It deliberately does not quote dispute or refund rates, because the figures in circulation are third-party estimates rather than platform-reported data.