From sourcing and factory vetting to QC, freight, tariffs, and ongoing cost optimization, Importivity gives you one clear program structure to manage your product from spec to landed inventory.
We do not hide our margin. We do not bury commissions inside your unit cost. We do not invent line items after the fact. What you pay Importivity, and exactly what it covers, is documented in writing in your engagement before we start. Pricing splits into two tracks based on the product you are bringing to market.
For products that already exist in the market and need white-labeling, rebranding, or light modification. Pricing is straight cost-plus on a tiered markup that drops as your lifetime spend with us grows.
| Up to $1M lifetime spend | 10% |
| $1M to $2M lifetime | 9% |
| $2M to $3M lifetime | 8% |
| $3M to $4M lifetime | 7% |
| $4M+ lifetime | 6% |
| $10M+ annual spend | 4.5% |
| Commodity programs* | 2% |
*Commodity track requires $5M minimum annual commodity volume.
For custom-developed or custom-engineered products. Pricing is set after a discovery meeting and delivered as a single fully-loaded quote. One unit price. Every cost between the factory and your door, accounted for.
Quote is built after a discovery meeting that maps spec, complexity, and scope of work. Prototyping and golden-sample deposits are scoped separately.
Your track, your markup or your quote, your deposit, and any expected additional services are documented in your engagement before any work begins. The number you sign is the number you pay.
Sample deposits cover real costs: factory shortlisting, vetting, negotiations, contracts, raw material acquisition, sampling, iteration oversight, and sample delivery. Any unused balance applies to the final payment of your first PO.
The more we ship together, the lower your cost-plus markup goes. The tiers above are not negotiation theater. They are the published schedule, applied automatically as your lifetime spend crosses each threshold.
Prototyping, design, and engineering are billed separately at the published rates shown below. Scope and ceiling are agreed before work starts. No mystery hours, no surprise invoices.
Floor for new programs: $50,000 initial order and $150,000 annual volume. Below that, we will tell you honestly on the consultation whether Importivity is the right partner or whether you would be better served running the first order direct and engaging us once volume justifies the model.
Some projects need prototyping work, industrial design, or engineering input before they are ready to manufacture. When they do, you see the rate up front. When they do not, you do not pay it.
Finding a factory is the easy part. The work that protects your margin, your IP, your launch timeline, and your shipments happens across six phases of the import process. The deliverables are the same regardless of which pricing track you are on. What changes is how we get compensated for them: built into the cost-plus markup on OTC programs, built into the fully-loaded quote on custom programs. Prototyping, design, and engineering are the only services billed separately, at the published rates above.
We map the right country, region, and supplier category for your product. Decisions about China-direct, plus-one diversification, or nearshoring get made up front, not after a launch goes sideways.
We qualify factories from our network of 1,000+ vetted partners. Capability audits, financial stability checks, compliance history, and capacity validation, before your product touches their floor.
We surface real comparative quotes across qualified factories so you understand where the market actually sits, not just where your first quote landed.
We trace upstream component and material flows so you know where the real bottlenecks and risks live, including tier-2 and tier-3 supplier exposure.
We manage the sample cycle until quality, fit, and finish match the production standard you will accept. Multiple iterations, factory pushback, and timeline pressure all handled by our team. Sampling costs sit inside your deposit.
Once a sample passes, we lock it as the QC reference for every production run that follows. Your standard is documented and enforceable, not subject to factory drift.
For custom products we oversee tooling specification, ownership terms, validation, and lifecycle management so your tooling investment stays protected and your tooling sits where it should.
When a product needs prototyping work to reach a manufacturable spec, that work runs as a separately quoted fixed-rate engagement (starting at $5,000). You see the number before we start.
NDAs, MOQs, payment terms, tooling ownership, exclusivity, and quality clauses. Written by people who have signed thousands of these and seen what goes wrong when they are not.
Supplier IP clauses, trademark registration support in production countries, and tooling ownership structured so your factory cannot turn around and sell your product to a competitor.
Mutual non-circumvention frames protect the supplier relationship we developed, the pricing leverage that comes with it, and your ability to operate without supplier end-runs.
We negotiate deposit, milestone, and final payment terms with the factory on your behalf so your cash exposure is structured around production milestones, not blank-check prepayments.
We track production against the agreed timeline and flag slippage early. Materials sourcing, labor allocation, and line scheduling, monitored by our team on the ground.
Inspection during production catches defects before they become container loads. AQL sampling protocols and defect classification, run by people who do this every week.
Final inspection against the golden sample before goods leave the factory. Issues identified here trigger rework rather than returns.
Our Asia operations team travels to Qingdao, Shenzhen, and other manufacturing hubs to oversee critical production runs in person. The factory knows we are watching.
We negotiate with freight forwarders, consolidate shipments where possible, and surface real landed-cost comparisons across ports, carriers, and shipping modes.
HTS classification, documentation, and customs broker coordination so your goods clear cleanly. Errors here cost weeks and dollars; we run the playbook that avoids both.
HTS classification review, country-of-origin engineering, free-trade-zone evaluation, and First Sale rule structuring where applicable. Tariff policy moves; we track it daily and act before it hits your P&L.
Whether you act as importer of record or we structure the program differently, we make sure the customs posture, documentation, and regulatory filings are right for your situation.
Single-supplier dependence is a business risk. We develop a qualified secondary factory in a different region so a quality issue, port closure, or geopolitical event does not stop your shipments.
Manufacturers raise prices. Constantly. Materials, labor, tariffs, FX, all become reasons. We push back on every increase with data, comparable quotes, and the leverage of moving volume elsewhere.
Every quarter we review your bill of materials, supplier performance, and freight spend for further savings. Optimization is not a project. It is the relationship.
Tariff shifts, factory capacity changes, raw material trends, and competitive sourcing intelligence. We surface what matters to your program before it shows up on your dock.
Most of our clients have been with us for years across multiple product programs. The model is built for that. The longer you ship with us, the less you pay us. The more you trust us with, the more we earn it back in price negotiation, freight savings, tariff strategy, and supply resilience.
Before any work starts, your engagement names which track you are on, what your markup or quote covers, what your deposit is, and what additional services we expect the project to need. No retainers running while we figure out scope.
Sample deposits are not a fee. They cover hard costs through sample delivery. Anything left over applies to the final payment of your first PO. For tooling-heavy products we recommend factory visits and deeper due diligence before significant tooling deposits.
The cost-plus tier schedule is published. Your markup steps down 1% for every additional $1M of lifetime spend, from 10% down to 6%. Annual spend above $10M unlocks 4.5%. Commodity programs can run as low as 2% at $5M+ annual commodity volume.
The average Importivity client saves 31% on landed cost net of our pricing. We will show you the comparison against your current supplier or competing quotes before you commit to anything.
Most importers operate one of three ways. We built Importivity to be the third.
Three of them, public. Many more under NDA.
From the first sample to the final container, Importivity ran a process I could actually see. Markup was on the table before I signed.
They negotiated three rounds of price increases away before they ever hit my invoice. That alone is worth the partnership.
Got us from rough prototype to a launch-ready product without ever feeling like we lost control of the IP or the timeline.
If something is not covered here, the consultation will get to it. We have never started a program without a client who fully understands the engagement terms. View all FAQs.
OTC and white-label programs run on a tiered cost-plus schedule. You start at 10% markup on actual landed cost. For every additional $1M of lifetime spend with us, your markup drops 1%, down to a 6% floor. Once your annual spend with us crosses $10M, you can move to 4.5%. Commodity programs can run as low as 2% with a minimum of $5M in annual commodity volume. Your tier is applied automatically as you cross each threshold; it is not something you have to renegotiate.
Custom projects are not cost-plus. They start with a discovery meeting where we walk through every detail of the product and develop a deep understanding of what you expect. From there we deliver a single fully-loaded quote that covers unit price, QC, shipping, duties, and every other cost of getting the product to your door. If the project requires prototyping work to reach a golden sample, we determine the prototyping fee at the close of discovery. If the product already exists in the market, we determine the sample deposit instead. Either way, you see the number before any work starts.
The deposit covers the tangible work required to get you to a production-ready sample: factory shortlisting, supplier vetting, negotiations, contracts, raw material acquisition, sample costs, oversight of sample iterations, and final sample delivery. Any unused balance on the deposit is applied to the final payment of your first PO, assuming you have no other active sourcing projects on our end.
Prototyping is a fixed-rate engagement that includes everything required to take a concept to a production-ready golden sample. It starts at $5,000 and scales based on the cost of the item and the scope of the work involved. The exact number is quoted at the close of the discovery meeting so you can decide whether to proceed before any prototyping work begins. The fee is a separate line item from your cost-plus markup or your custom quote, and it is disclosed in writing before we start.
Design is billed at $80 per hour. Engineering is billed at $100 to $120 per hour depending on the seniority of the engineer assigned. Both are billed only when the project actually requires them, with the scope, estimated hours, and ceiling agreed in writing before anyone logs time against your project. You will not be billed for design or engineering on a straightforward white-label run.
Yes. To take on a new program we need to see a $50,000 initial order and at least $150,000 in annual volume. Below those numbers the model does not produce real savings net of our involvement, and we would be wasting your money. We will tell you on the consultation if your project is below the floor and recommend what to do instead, often direct-source the first run and engage us once volume justifies the partnership.
For tooling-heavy products we recommend a different starting point than in-house sample comparison. We arrange factory visits and a deeper level of due diligence into each shortlisted factory's capabilities before any significant tooling deposit goes anywhere. The right factory is identified through audit and verification rather than through sample-versus-sample comparison. It costs slightly more up front; it saves enormously if the alternative is paying for tooling at the wrong factory.
There are none. The cost-plus markup is our only compensation on an OTC program. The fully-loaded quote is our only compensation on a custom program. Prototyping, design, and engineering are billed openly at the rates published on this page. We do not take backend commissions from factories on your unit cost. If we ever did, the tier schedule would not need to drop the way it does.
Yes. If you have multiple active sourcing projects with us, unused deposit balances can be reconciled against any one of them. The default is to apply unused balance to the final payment of the first PO produced from that engagement, but the path is documented in your engagement before you sign.
Often, yes. Many clients come to us already producing somewhere and looking for a partner to professionalize the program, run QC properly, address tariff exposure, or develop a plus-one backup. We will tell you on the consultation whether your existing factory can be folded into a program or whether a fresh sourcing exercise is the better starting point.
Most clients are on a discovery call within 48 hours of submitting a request, with engagement terms and pricing mapped within 7 days. Sampling timelines depend on the product, but we can often have first samples in hand within 3 to 5 weeks.
Bring a product, a target landed cost, and a quote from your current supplier. In 30 minutes we will tell you which track you fit, what your markup or quote would look like, where the savings actually are, and exactly what an engagement with us would cost over the life of the account.
Track, markup, deposit, and additional services are documented in your signed engagement before any work begins.
