A quotation from a Chinese factory looks like an itemised bill. Unit price, tooling, inspection, packaging, inland freight, sometimes a line for documents. The itemisation is what makes it feel verifiable. Each number sits on its own row, and rows that sit on their own tend to get read as facts.

Read also: The Price Rise that is not a Price Rise

Some of those rows are not facts. They are placeholders the supplier put there because the total needed to land somewhere, and a line item is easier to defend than a higher unit price.

I run sourcing and quality control in Yiwu, and quotations pass across my desk most weeks. Tooling and inspection are where I find the softness.

Tooling first. A mould for an injection-moulded part costs money to cut, and the first customer who orders that shape does pay for it. Where the buyer loses the thread is what happens afterwards, because the mould does not disappear once that order ships. It sits on a shelf at the factory, and when a second buyer asks for something close enough to the same shape, the factory can run it again with a modest change to the cavity or none at all. The tooling line still appears on the second quotation. Sometimes it appears at the full original amount.

The supplier is not necessarily lying. Ask directly and you will often get a straight answer about which parts of the mould are new and which are carried over. The line survives because almost nobody asks. It is easier to write the number that was there last time.

The question that opens this up is narrow. Ask whether the mould is new or modified, and if modified, what specifically changed. A factory that is quoting an honest amortised share will tell you which cavity was recut. A factory that copied the line from the last quotation will pause, because it has not thought about the question in those terms and the pause is the answer.

Inspection is the other one. A quotation that carries an inspection charge implies someone is going to look at the goods before they ship. Often nobody is. The charge gets priced and invoiced like any other line, and the container fills up after the same glance the packing staff were giving the cartons anyway.

This is not always deceit either. Plenty of factories do have a quality person, and that person does walk the line. The gap is between what the buyer imagines they bought and what is actually scheduled. A buyer paying an inspection line usually pictures a defined check against a defined standard at a defined moment. What the charge often covers is general oversight already built into how the plant runs.

Here the useful question is about evidence. Ask what the inspection produces. Something that was really inspected leaves behind a document carrying a date, a sample size, what was checked against and a result. If what comes back instead is an offer to send photographs, you have been offered photographs. Worth knowing before the deposit rather than after the container arrives.

There is a reason these soft lines exist, and it connects to something I wrote about in these pages last month. Dollar quotations are what buyers ask for. Renminbi is what the factory’s own costs are denominated in. That mismatch has a price, and between quotation and payment it is the supplier who pays it. Padding a line item is one of the ways a factory builds a buffer against a currency risk it never agreed to carry and usually cannot hedge.

Read that way, the padding is a symptom of how the quote was constructed rather than a character flaw in the person who sent it. That matters for how a buyer should respond. Treating a soft tooling line as evidence of dishonesty produces a defensive supplier and a worse relationship. Treating it as a buffer opens a different conversation, one where you can ask what the buffer is actually protecting against and whether there is a cleaner way to handle it.

Sometimes the cleaner way is to accept the buffer and put a number on it. A supplier who is told plainly that the quote is understood to include a cushion, and who is asked to name the cushion instead of hiding it, will often name it. A number on the table can be negotiated. A number hidden inside a tooling line cannot.

Buyers sometimes take this further than the evidence allows, so two boundaries are worth stating.

The first is that a padded line does not tell you the total is too high. I have seen quotations with a soft tooling charge sitting above a unit price below what the materials should cost, which is a worse sign than the padding. Line items describe how the total was assembled. They are not a verdict on whether the total is fair.

Strip the padding and watch what the supplier does with the total. If the total holds, you have learned something about the total. If it falls by exactly the amount you stripped, the line was decorative.

The second is that none of this can be checked from a listing page or a first email. A quotation is a document produced for you specifically, and the questions above only work once you have one in hand and someone on the other side who is willing to answer. Buyers who try to run this analysis on a public product page are reading a sales page as if it were a cost breakdown.

The obvious argument for asking early is bargaining position. That is the less useful half of it. The better half is that both answers are free, and free information about a supplier is rare.

A plant that can account precisely for which cavity was recut has shown you how it thinks about its own costs. An inspection protocol that survives being read has shown you where the quality function actually lives. Silence on both is also an answer, and August is a better month to hear it than November.

Liam Cai is the founder of Supplymo and runs sourcing and quality control in Yiwu, China, for overseas buyers.