The carton is the unit: what 385,000 wholesale listings say about minimum order quantity

The carton is the unit: what 385,000 listings say about minimum order quantity

Every new importer asks the same first question — "what is your minimum order?" — and expects a number in dollars. It almost never is one. The minimum is a physical fact: how many pieces the factory puts in one box.

We run a wholesale catalogue of 385,341 listings from 5,530 Chinese factories. Here is what the numbers actually look like when you measure them instead of guessing.

The numbers

From a 6,000-item sample of the live catalogue:

• median price per piece: ¥9.30 (about $1.45 at our published rate)
• 52% of items are under ¥10 a piece
• 92% are under ¥50
• median minimum order: 84 pieces
• the common carton sizes: 24, 36, 48, 72, 96, 120

Those carton sizes are not a pricing tier. They are the factory's packing line: a large radio-controlled truck comes twelve to a carton, small figures come several hundred. The box is the unit, and nobody downstream gets to redefine it.

Why "one piece" is not cheaper for anyone

Breaking a carton sounds like a favour to a small buyer. It is not, for three reasons that all cost money:

1. The remainder becomes dead stock. Nineteen pieces of a twenty-piece carton sit in a warehouse until someone wants exactly nineteen.
2. The factory packaging is destroyed. That packaging is what lets the goods be sold as new.
3. The handling cost per piece explodes. Picking, repacking and re-labelling one item costs the same as handling a whole carton.

So the honest answer to "can I order one?" is no — and the useful answer is that a test carton of a cheap model costs less than most people expect. At a median ¥9.30 and a median carton of 84, a typical test is around ¥781, roughly $122 at our rate. That is the real entry price of wholesale, and it is a fifth of what most first-time buyers assume.

What this changes about buying

Buy width, not depth, on the first order. Twenty models at one carton each tells you what sells. One model at twenty cartons tells you nothing until it is too late.

Price per piece is the wrong comparison number. Compare price per carton against the shelf space the carton will occupy and the weeks it will take to clear.

Minimum order value is a separate question from minimum order quantity. We do not have a minimum order value at all: one carton of one model is a valid order. Many suppliers do have one, and conflating the two is how buyers end up ordering four times what they need.

The part nobody budgets for

The carton decides freight too. Freight is charged on gross weight or volumetric weight, whichever is greater, and cheap bulky toys are almost always volumetric. A carton of ¥11 plush is light and enormous; a carton of ¥11 die-cast cars is small and heavy. The same money buys wildly different freight bills, and you find out at the quote, not at the order.

Transit times matter for the same reason: sea is the cheapest and the slowest, and the ranges run from 2 days to Hong Kong to 45 days to Chile. We publish them per country for 62 destinations.

And one date overrides all of it: Chinese New Year falls on 6 February 2027, with roughly six weeks of disrupted output around it. The backward count from your shelf date is on our production calendar.

The catalogue itself, with per-piece and per-carton prices on every item, is at opttoyschina.com.