Importing from China to the Philippines: when the payment becomes yours
Somebody else paid for the first orders. This page is about the one after that.
Indicative reference rate, updated . Your payable amount is confirmed against your invoice before you fund.
Price the factory's invoice
Enter the invoice in yuan and choose how you would fund it.
You send about
1,490.82 USDT
≈ ₱93,346.45
1 USDT ≈ ¥6.71
A great deal of Philippine importing starts without the importer ever paying China. An agent, a consolidator, or a contact with an account over there fronts the supplier and bills you here — and for a first order that is a sensible arrangement rather than a bad one. It stops being sensible at the point where the orders outgrow the favour. Taking the payment back is not only a margin decision: it changes who the money goes to, what you hold afterwards to show for it, and what has to be true about your supplier before anything can move at all.
- The payee is a named company
- Goods and services declared separately
- No peso funding leg
One line you can pin down while the rest is still moving
Everything else about a first order stays an estimate until it lands. The proforma total is the line that can be made firm, and it is also the one that leaves your side first.
- What changes
- Who you pay
- Held still
- The CNY total
- Funded with
- USDT · USDC
PHP
Priced in PHP, funded from USDT or USDC
USDT
Native Unigox Wallet
USDC
Native Unigox Wallet
Recipient gets
ChinaCNY
The exact yuan stated on the invoice, paid to the recipient in China.
What does it cost to import from China to the Philippines?
Not a figure anybody can hand you, and the honest breakdown runs longer than people expect. The factory's price at a quantity they will agree to rather than the one on the listing. Sea or air freight, plus whatever is riding on top of it this month. Insurance. The broker and the clearance. The duties and taxes your goods attract once somebody has classified them. The run from the port to wherever you store and sell. The months your money is asleep. And the fraction of every consignment that turns up unsellable. One line of that can be made exact today, which is what the supplier is paid. The customs side turns on classification and on rules we have not verified and will not paraphrase — a broker answers those, and the answer occasionally changes which product is worth buying at all.
A gap on this page is better than a confident number that turns out to describe somebody else's shipment. The people who can fill that gap are inexpensive while you are still choosing a product and expensive once a container is on the water.
Three things that change when you pay the factory yourself
- Step 01
The payee stops being a favour
While somebody pays on your behalf, the supplier's identity is their problem to solve. Once it is your payment, the destination has to be the manufacturer's own business account on the Chinese mainland, named in Latin letters and in Chinese characters. An individual's account is refused, and so is a Hong Kong one.
- Step 02
The description becomes yours to write
Every payment states what it is for — goods or services — and who is receiving it, a supplier or a service provider. That was implicit while an agent was handling it. Now it is a sentence you write, and it should match the invoice it is paying rather than the arrangement behind it.
- Step 03
The timing becomes yours to carry
A deposit and a balance are two separate payments, each priced at the moment you make it rather than at the moment terms were agreed. A price you are shown lasts ten minutes — a cap on how out of date it can be, not a rate held open for you. None of that is worse than the old arrangement; it is simply yours to plan around now.
From recipient details to a tracked CNY payment
- 01
Add the recipient
Choose the supported China destination and enter the recipient details exactly as provided.
- 02
Enter the CNY invoice
Add the amount, purpose, relationship and optional invoice reference before pricing.
- 03
Choose how to fund
Select USDT or USDC from your native Unigox Wallet.
- 04
Review and follow the payment
Confirm the exact source and destination amounts, then follow the status from the same flow.
Pay from where your money already is
Unigox Wallet
Choose USDT or USDC
- Choose USDT or USDC
- Review the required wallet amount
- The recipient still receives CNY
Stablecoin rates and top-ups
What you gain by paying the factory directly, besides the margin
The saving is the obvious part, and it is usually smaller than expected once the agent's genuine work is priced properly. The part that gets overlooked is the record. When somebody else pays China for you, what you end up holding is a chat thread and a local receipt from a person. When you pay the manufacturer, what you hold is an invoice from a named company and a payment that went to that same company's account — one story, told the same way twice.
That is worth something the first time anybody asks you about a shipment, and worth more the first time the supplier and the delivery disagree about what was ordered. It is also why the route's stubbornness about the payee reads as a feature here rather than an obstacle: the awkward request for the factory's own bank details, the one people skip out of politeness, becomes something the payment simply will not proceed without.
Two payees, and why they should stay two payments
Most Philippine importers who go direct keep their agent, and they are right to. Sourcing, inspection, consolidation and the freight arrangement are real services with real value, and losing them to save a fee is a false economy. What changes is that the agent is now billing you for those services rather than for your goods. Two different payments, to two different companies, each declared for what it is: the factory as your supplier, for goods; the agent or forwarder as a service provider, for services.
Folding a commission into the factory's invoice is the habit that makes this messy later. It leaves you with a CNY total that neither party can reconcile against their own records, it hides what the service actually costs you, and it weakens your position in any later argument about the goods. Ask for the two invoices separately. Anyone who has dealt with an experienced buyer before will have been asked already.
The supplier payment, and where the pesos actually stop
Put the CNY total from the proforma into the flow and it returns the two figures that decide anything, before you approve a thing: the stablecoin amount you part with, cost included, and the exact yuan the factory receives. There is no fee shown on a line of its own because there is no fee on a line of its own — it is inside the amount you fund, which is why the comparison worth making is those two figures against each other.
No pesos move at any point. This journey collects in one currency only and it is not PHP, so what funds a payment is a USDT or USDC balance in your Unigox Wallet. Getting pesos into that balance happens before Unigox, in a market we neither price nor watch. Your supplier is not part of any of it: an ordinary yuan credit lands in their business account, and they need no wallet, no exchange account and no opinion about how your side was arranged.
Amounts are bounded at both ends. A floor and a ceiling are read from live liquidity at the moment you ask rather than set on a rate card, and both appear in the flow before you fund, so a sample-sized payment and a container-sized one each learn where they stand before anything is committed. A big order therefore becomes two or three payments rather than one, which is a conversation to have with the factory while they still want the business. And this payout route is weeks old rather than years — wired and tested from end to end, with nothing behind it yet that anyone would call routine — so put a small, unhurried order through it first.
The questions this page will not answer
Duty, tax and what happens at the port are what people search hardest here, and they are exactly what a payments company should not be improvising. The answer turns on how your goods are classified and on rules we have not checked. A customs broker can tell you while you are still choosing between products, and that is the only point at which the answer is still able to change what you order rather than only what it costs you.
The same restraint covers what your own bank expects of you when you pay an overseas supplier. We have not verified it, so this page names no rule and no threshold. Ask your bank and your adviser while the order is still a quotation. And if a route ever looks attractive mainly because it seems to go around something, that is the reason to ask them first rather than a reason to proceed.
Built for the way the Philippines pays China
Two things shape this flow: China is a major sourcing corridor for the Philippines, and the invoice at the end of it is written in yuan and paid into a mainland company account.
Questions before a first direct payment
01Can I keep my sourcing agent and still pay the factory myself?
Yes, and most people should. The agent carries on sourcing, inspecting and consolidating, and invoices you for those as services. The factory invoices you for the goods. Two payments, two companies, two declarations — which is also how the records stay legible a year later.
02Can I pay the supplier in Philippine pesos?
No. There is no PHP collection leg in this journey, so pesos never enter the payment. You fund from USDT or USDC in your Unigox Wallet, and how you reached that balance stays between you and your own bank.
03The factory wants the deposit sent to the owner's personal account. Is that normal?
It happens often, and it is where first-time import money most reliably goes missing. This route settles the question for you by refusing an individual's account outright: the money goes to a business account at a mainland Chinese bank or it does not go. So ask for the factory's own details. If that turns out to be difficult, you have learned something about the company while it is still cheap to learn it.
04Can I pay a deposit now and the balance when the goods are ready?
Yes. They are two ordinary payments against the same commercial invoice, each priced at the moment you make it, so the second reflects the market then rather than now. Both have to sit inside the floor and ceiling the flow shows you, which are read from live liquidity rather than fixed in advance.
05Is a sample order too small to pay for this way?
The floor shown in the flow answers that, and it is read from live liquidity rather than published here. What is worth knowing on a small payment is that the cost sits inside the amount you fund rather than on a line of its own, so compare that amount against the CNY the supplier receives — the gap is a far larger share of a sample than of a production run.
Take the supplier payment back, one invoice at a time
Open the payment flow, add the recipient and compare USDT, USDC before funding.
Price a factory invoiceRelated China guides
Built primarily for businesses
Built for importers and repeat supplier payers. A private individual paying a business invoice runs the same checks and gets the same quote — the recipient on this route is always a company.