There are many economic benefits to produce your goods in China, but you must also be very aware of quality issues that may arise. Although there were several racist comments of the past regarding poor quality goods being produced in China, there was much American propaganda than hard facts, there are still quality control issues that are a serious concern to companies no matter where a product is made. The issue is simply amplified in China because of the remoteness of the factory, extreme language barriers, and lack of strict governmental controls.

The American government only publicises hundreds of quality issues every month of product recalls, and that is the reason when they create a serious threat to the safety of users - in most cases, defective products rarely trigger an entire recall. It can often harm the brand's sales by as much as 5% over the coming years, but even on a smaller scale, defective products that don't trigger a recall can still seriously harm your brand in the eyes of consumers. In order to avoid these problems, companies use a variety of inspection and quality control methods we will discuss later. The solution is to use a local inspection company in China that you can trust to provide prompt and accurate quality assurances.

Once the work order is placed, a qualified engineer will be sent out to the factory in question - often unannounced. The engineer will randomly choose a box of products, and then the box will be opened and examined. Those products will be checked initially against a checklist of specified factors - size, colour, button placements etc. There will then be further testing using specialised equipment to test for more specific problems like electrical current leakage.

When production companies are given a work order, the contract actually specifies a failure tolerance rate. No production run can be perfect, there will always be human errors or machine imperfections in plastic mouldings etc - but the failure tolerance rate determines what percentage of imperfections in the product are tolerated before the contract has been legally breached. For example, a 10% failure rate would mean during testing it is OK to find 1 out of every 10 products is defective in some way.