If you are looking for the best sites to import from China to Nigeria, you have probably already found the obvious names. Alibaba. AliExpress. Maybe 1688, if someone in a WhatsApp group mentioned it.

Finding the sourcing site is the easy part. What costs Nigerian importers money is everything that happens after the product is found: a supplier who will not take a Nigerian card, a factory that works only in Mandarin, a quote that covers the goods but not the clearing, and a shipping bill calculated on cartons full of air.

This guide covers both halves. First the sourcing sites and what each is genuinely good for. Then the part nobody writes about, which is what the goods actually cost by the time they reach your warehouse, and the four places that cost quietly inflates.

Importing from China is not a risky business. Standard Bank’s Africa Trade Barometer, which surveyed 2,218 firms across ten African markets, found the share of African businesses sourcing from China rose from 23% in 2023 to 34% in 2024. Roughly one in three now does it. The ones who lose money are not losing it on the website they chose.

Part 1: The sourcing sites, compared

These are the platforms Nigerian importers actually use. The differences matter more than most guides suggest, because they conflate four very different marketplaces.

1688.com: the factory floor

1688 is Alibaba Group’s domestic wholesale marketplace, built for buyers inside China. Many sellers on Alibaba and AliExpress buy their own stock here, which is why prices typically run 20% to 50% below Alibaba for the same goods. It connects buyers directly with manufacturers and primary wholesalers, cutting out the export middleman.

What you give up is every convenience built for a foreign buyer. The interface is Chinese. Suppliers communicate through AliWangwang or WeChat in Mandarin. Payment clears in RMB through Alipay or a Chinese bank transfer. Most listed suppliers do not ship internationally.

None of that is unsolvable. Chrome’s auto-translate handles the interface. Image search finds the same product at a lower tier. A useful trick: copy the Chinese product title from an Alibaba listing and paste it into 1688 search, which returns far more results than an English query. What you still need is a way to pay in RMB and a way to get the goods out of China.

Alibaba.com: the export-facing option

English interface, Trade Assurance on qualifying orders, suppliers used to foreign buyers and international freight. For a first bulk order the premium often buys a worthwhile safety net.

One thing worth knowing before you rely on badges: the Gold Supplier label means the seller paid a membership fee. It does not mean they manufacture the goods, comply with export rules, or will match your sample. Verified Supplier indicates a third-party document audit, which is more meaningful but still not a quality guarantee. Trade Assurance holds funds in escrow, but refunds are denied if your specifications were vague, if no inspection was arranged, or if defects are only found after the goods reach Nigeria.

Taobao and AliExpress

Taobao is China’s consumer marketplace. Strong for fashion, accessories and trend-led stock in small batches, and useful for finding unique items through image search. Chinese only, domestic delivery only.

AliExpress is retail. Order a sample here before committing to a carton. It is a poor place to buy anything you intend to resell, because you pay retail and then pay express shipping on top of it.

Part 2: What the goods actually cost

Here is where most importers get caught. The factory price is often less than half of what the goods cost by the time they are in your warehouse.

Your real landed cost is the product price converted from RMB, plus domestic Chinese freight to the consolidator, plus international freight, plus marine insurance, plus Nigerian import duty of 0% to 35% on the CIF value, plus 7.5% VAT, plus the 7% ETLS surcharge, plus the CISS fee, plus SONCAP or NAFDAC fees where they apply, plus clearing agent fees, plus terminal handling, plus inland trucking, plus demurrage if anything goes wrong.

Demurrage at Apapa can exceed US$100 per container per day. It starts a few days after the vessel arrives, and it is the fastest way a profitable order becomes a loss.

A working rule among importers who last: price at 2.5 to 3 times your landed cost, not your product cost. A 1.5x margin gets eaten alive by naira volatility, customer returns and marketing costs.

Part 3: The four places your cost quietly inflates

These are the costs that do not appear as a line item. You never get charged for them directly. You just notice the total is higher than you budgeted and assume that is normal.

1. You pay to ship air

You order ten items from different suppliers. They arrive at a warehouse in China. If nobody merges the cartons, removes the fillers and strips the unnecessary packaging, everything ships exactly as it arrived.

You are charged by weight or volume. So you are not paying for ten compact items. You are paying for ten cartons, the nylon, the foam and the empty space between them. This is invisible because you were told your goods would be shipped, not how they would be packed. Ask any provider directly whether they consolidate and repack, and whether that costs extra.

2. The quote was an estimate, not a figure

You get a cost before shipping and it looks fine. Then the goods arrive and there are additional charges before anything is released. At that point the container is at the port, you cannot cancel, and you pay whatever you are told.

The question to ask before you commit is whether the shipping quote includes customs clearance or excludes it. Those are very different numbers, and a quote that excludes clearing will always look cheaper than one that includes it.

3. Nobody checked the goods

In most arrangements, no one opens your cartons before they ship. You find out what is in them when they reach Lagos, which is thousands of miles too late to do anything about it.

Third-party pre-shipment inspection in China runs roughly US$149 to US$320 per man-day from firms like TESTCOO, TradeAider, V-Trust, QIMA and SGS. Set that against the arithmetic: a 20% defect rate on a US$30,000 order is a US$6,000 loss, against roughly US$300 of inspection. Most Nigerian importers either do not know pre-shipment inspection exists or assume it is a service for multinationals. It is not.

Your supplier checking their own goods is not an inspection. It is the supplier’s opinion of the supplier’s work.

4. You sourced blind

Thousands of suppliers, prices that vary wildly for the same item, quality you cannot assess from photographs, and a language gap in the middle. So you pick the cheaper supplier and receive worse goods, or you overpay because you never saw the real market price, or you order the wrong specification because something was lost in translation.

A workable verification routine before you pay anyone: cross-check the business licence number on Tianyancha or Qichacha, confirm the company name on the storefront matches the bank account name, ask for a live video walk of the factory, and reverse-image search the product photos to spot stolen catalogues.

And the single biggest loss pattern in this market: a supplier who asks you to pay off-platform, to a personal account, to WeChat Pay or by Western Union, to avoid fees. That voids every protection you had. If the bank details on the final invoice differ from earlier correspondence, stop and verify by a channel you already trust.

Part 4: Three ways to actually get the goods home

Every sourcing site above ends at the same wall. The supplier is in China, your money is in naira, and your warehouse is in Lagos or Aba or Kano. There are three ways across, and the choice affects your profit more than the marketplace did.

Route 1: A procurement agent

You send product links to an agent. They buy, receive and ship. It is the oldest route and still the most common.

It works until it does not. You rarely see the supplier invoice, so you cannot separate what the goods cost from what you were charged. Pricing is quoted per job rather than published. The agent holds the supplier relationship, so if they stop responding you lose the supplier too. And a recurring pattern in this market is the local agent who collects an upfront fee and goes quiet.

Importers who have been through it rarely describe outright theft. They describe a slow loss of visibility until they no longer knew what they were paying for.

Route 2: A freight forwarder

Companies like GIG Logistics give you a receiving address in China and move your goods home, publishing rates of around $10.50 per kg for regular air cargo and $550 per CBM for general sea freight with clearance included.

That is a clean solution to half the problem. Shipping is handled and priced openly. Payment is not. You still have to pay a supplier who will not accept your card, which is how most importers end up back with an agent anyway, paying two parties for one job.

Route 3: Do it yourself on a platform

The third route is to run the whole thing yourself through one account, where you stay the buyer rather than handing the job to someone else.

Proc360, registered under CheckIt Limited with warehouses in China and Nigeria, is built for this. You find verified suppliers on 1688, Alibaba, Pinduoduo and elsewhere from inside the app. You fund a wallet and pay your Chinese suppliers directly, with no RMB account needed. You request a quality check before your goods leave China and get a report showing what was checked and the exact quantity received. You combine orders from different suppliers into one shipment and save on shipping. You track the shipment from the warehouse to your door, and your goods clear customs without you chasing anyone.

The published rates: air freight at $11.40 per kg for regular items and $12.80 for special items, sea freight at $390 per CBM, quality checks at $0.50 per kg, consolidation free, and 30 days of free storage in your own China storage unit. Shipping includes customs clearance, which is why comparing it against a quote that excludes clearing is not comparing the same thing.

If you would rather not place the order yourself, Buy For Me handles the purchase on your behalf at 6% on product links, 8% on pictures and 10% on descriptions, with inspection by default and a refund policy you can hold someone to. Most people start there and move to self-serve once they have done it once.

More than 10,000 businesses have signed up and over 2,000 transactions have crossed the platform, representing more than $750,000 in procurement value. That figure is the value of goods users bought, not platform revenue.