How to Import from China to Nigeria: The Complete 2026 Walkthrough

Most people who ask how to import from China are really asking one of two questions. Either they want a specific thing that nobody in Nigeria seems to stock, or they want to sell something and they have heard that China is where the margin lives. Both are reasonable. The problem is that almost everything written about it either skips the boring parts or tries to sell you a course.

So here is the whole thing, in order, with the numbers where numbers are honest and a shrug where they are not.

What importing from China actually involves

Strip away the vocabulary and there are seven moves. You pick a product. You find a supplier who will sell it at a price you can verify. You add up everything the product will cost by the time it reaches you, not just the sticker. You pay through a route that leaves a record. Somebody moves the goods from a factory in Guangdong or Zhejiang to an aircraft or a vessel. Somebody clears them through Nigeria Customs. Then a courier brings the box to your gate.

Every version of importing is those seven moves. What changes is how many of them you do yourself. A trader flying to Guangzhou does all seven. Someone ordering through a catalog priced in naira does one and a half. Everyone else sits somewhere in the middle, usually with a WhatsApp contact doing the parts they cannot see.

Knowing which moves you have taken on is the difference between a business and an expensive hobby.

Step one: decide what you are buying and why

This sounds obvious and it is where most first orders go wrong. There are two completely different reasons to import, and they need different behaviour.

If you are buying for yourself, your job is simple. Get the right item, in the right size, at a total cost you are happy with, in a timeframe you can live with. You do not need MOQ negotiation, you do not need a supplier relationship, and you certainly do not need a container.

If you are buying to resell, everything changes. Now you care about unit economics, reorder speed, size curves, and whether the supplier will still exist in four months. A product that is fun to own can be terrible to stock. Chargers are a good example: high demand, thin margin after returns, and a certification question attached to anything with a battery.

Write down which of the two you are before you open a single listing. If you are honest about it, half the bad decisions disappear on their own.

Step two: find the product at a price you can verify

Chinese wholesale mostly runs through a handful of platforms. 1688 is the domestic one, built for buyers inside China, and it is where the real factory pricing sits. Alibaba is the export-facing sibling of the same group, with English, escrow, and prices that carry an export desk on top. Taobao is retail. AliExpress is retail with international shipping bolted on. Temu is retail with aggressive subsidy.

For anything you intend to sell, 1688 is usually the honest number and Alibaba is the same factory quoting differently. For a one-off personal item, the difference often does not justify the extra work.

Wherever you look, the header price is not the price. On 1688 the number in the big font is normally the cheapest tier of the cheapest variant, which is frequently a colour nobody orders or a quantity you will not hit. The number that matters lives in the price table further down, on the row that matches your quantity and your variant. Reading that table properly is the single most useful skill in this whole process.

Two other things to check on the listing before you get attached:

• MOQ. The minimum the supplier will sell. Some are two pieces, some are two hundred. There are ways around it, but not always.
• The spec table. Material, weight, dimensions, packing. This is the least decorated part of a listing and therefore the most reliable. It is readable without Chinese once you know which rows matter.

Step three: work out what it will actually cost you

This is the step people skip, and it is the reason so many import stories end in confusion. The yuan price is one line out of six.

A rough rule that holds surprisingly well for small fashion and accessory orders: by the time an item reaches you in Nigeria, it costs somewhere between two and three times the yuan sticker converted at whatever rate you used. Sometimes less on dense, heavy, high-value goods. Often more on light, bulky, cheap ones.

That multiplier is not a law of physics, and you should not price a business on it. It is a sanity check. If a supplier or an agent quotes you something far below it, ask which line they left out. The full breakdown is worth reading before your first order.

Step four: pay in a way that leaves a trail

Chinese domestic platforms are built for Chinese payment rails. Your Nigerian card will usually be declined on 1688, and when it is not declined it often fails at the verification step. That is not a fault in your bank. It is a mismatch between two payment systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

So the money has to travel some other way. Broadly there are four:

1. Through a platform that accepts international cards. Alibaba, AliExpress and Temu do. You pay more for the product and less in hassle.
2. Through a sourcing agent. You pay them in naira, they pay the supplier in yuan. Convenient, and only as safe as the agent.
3. Through a bank wire. Viable for larger commercial orders, with paperwork attached.
4. Through a store that has already done the buying. You pay a naira price on a checkout, the store carries the currency and supplier risk.

Whichever route you take, one rule holds. Never send money to a personal bank account for a commercial transaction. Not because everyone who asks is a fraudster, but because a personal account gives you nothing to point at when something goes wrong. A checkout produces an order number, a receipt, and a record on both sides. A transfer to Chidi’s GTBank account produces a screenshot.

On ShopFluxx the payment step is an ordinary online checkout in naira, and the price you see is the price charged. There is no separate freight invoice later.

Step five: freight, and the two to four week window

Goods leave China by air or by sea. For the volumes most Nigerian buyers deal in, air is the default and sea only starts making sense once you are moving real bulk.

Air freight for consolidated small parcels typically puts goods on the ground in Lagos within two to four weeks of payment. That window is not the flight. The flight is hours. The window is everything around it: the supplier picking and packing, domestic delivery to the warehouse, waiting for the consolidation to fill, the booking, the flight, and clearance on arrival. Broken down week by week it makes a lot more sense.

Sea freight runs roughly five to eight weeks door to door and only becomes worth the wait at volume. If you are ordering forty pieces, air is the answer. If you are ordering four hundred kilos of something dense, run the numbers again.

Two things stretch the window more than anything else. Chinese New Year, which closes factories for weeks and leaves a backlog behind it. And the September to December peak, when everybody in the world is shipping at once and capacity gets tight. Plan around both.

Step six: customs, and what nobody can promise you

Import duty in Nigeria is assessed on the CIF value, meaning the cost of the goods plus insurance plus freight, not just what you paid the factory. The applicable rate depends on how the goods are classified under the HS code system. On top of duty there are additional charges including a surcharge, a levy, and VAT calculated on the running total.

The exact percentages change, which is why any article that hands you a fixed number is either out of date or making it up. The mechanics are worth understanding even if the rates move, because the mechanics tell you where the number comes from.

Worth saying plainly: Nigeria does have a de minimis threshold. In September 2025 the Customs Service Board approved duty-free treatment for qualifying consignments valued at 300 dollars or less, capped at four importations a year and framed around express shipments and passenger baggage. That is real relief with real conditions, which is not the same as a guarantee, because qualification depends on the value, the annual cap, the channel the goods arrive by, and how customs assesses them. An honest operator will tell you this.

There is also a shorter list worth knowing: things Nigeria restricts or prohibits outright. One prohibited item inside a consolidated shipment can hold everybody else’s goods, which is why serious operations screen what goes into a box. Check the list before you order something unusual.

Step seven: last mile, and the first ten minutes after the box opens

Lagos is where almost everything lands, because that is where the airports and the clearing capacity are. From there goods move out by road. Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan and Benin are typically a day or two behind Lagos. Kano, Jos and Maiduguri a little more. The extra leg is usually days, not weeks.

When the box arrives, do the boring thing before you get excited. Film yourself opening it. Count the pieces against the packing list. Check sizes and colours against what you ordered. Keep the outer packaging until you are satisfied.

This takes four minutes and it is the entire difference between a claim that gets settled and a claim that becomes an argument. What to photograph, and how.

Three routes, honestly compared

There is no universally right answer here. Somebody importing four hundred pairs of shoes a month should absolutely build their own supply chain, and would be wasting money doing anything else. Somebody buying twelve bags for a shop opening should not.

What matters is choosing deliberately rather than defaulting into whichever route a friend recommended.

The mistakes that cost the most

• Pricing off the header number. Everything downstream is wrong if this is wrong.
• Ordering a full size run on a first order. Order small, learn the fit, then commit.
• Paying into a personal account. You are buying a screenshot.
• Ignoring volumetric weight. Light and bulky is the most expensive combination in freight. Understand CBM before you order puffer jackets.
• Not budgeting for the wait. Money in a container is money you cannot spend. Plan the gap.
• Believing a duty-free promise. See above.

Questions people ask

How long does it take to import from China to Nigeria?

Two to four weeks door to door is the realistic window for small parcels moving by air, measured from payment rather than from dispatch. Sea freight runs roughly five to eight weeks. Chinese New Year and the September to December peak both stretch those windows, sometimes considerably.

How much does it cost to import from China to Nigeria?

For small fashion and accessory orders, expect the total landed cost to land somewhere between two and three times the yuan price converted to naira. Goods, China domestic freight, international freight, duty and charges, currency spread, and last-mile delivery are the six lines that make up the difference.

Can I pay 1688 directly from Nigeria?

Usually not. 1688 is built for buyers inside China and expects Chinese payment methods. Nigerian cards are commonly declined at checkout or at verification. Most Nigerian buyers pay through an agent, an export-facing platform, or a store that has already handled the purchase.

Do I have to pay customs duty on small orders?

Possibly not. Qualifying consignments valued at 300 dollars or less may clear duty free under the threshold introduced in September 2025, capped at four importations a year. Because that relief is conditional, anyone guaranteeing the outcome is promising something customs decides rather than they do.

What is the minimum I can order from China?

It depends on the supplier’s MOQ, which ranges from two pieces to several hundred. Consolidators and import stores buy across many customers, which is how small orders get placed against suppliers who would otherwise refuse them.

Is it cheaper to import or to buy in Lagos?

For one or two items, buying locally is often cheaper once your time and the freight are counted. Importing wins on volume, on products with no local supply, and on categories where the local market marks up heavily. The break-even is closer than most people assume.

A first order, start to finish

The seven steps above, applied to one hypothetical purchase, so the sequence is concrete rather than abstract.

1. Decide. You want twenty crossbody bags to sell. Not for yourself, so unit economics and reorder matter.
2. Find it. Screenshot a bag selling well locally, cropped tight. Image search it on a wholesale platform. Filter for suppliers with a strong repurchase rate and two or more years trading. Open five listings.
3. Read the right price. On each, find the price table row for twenty pieces in the colour you want. Ignore the header price entirely.
4. Check the goods. Scroll the full detail gallery on each. Discard anything with no interior photograph. Read the material row.
5. Estimate the freight. Take the carton dimensions from the spec table, run the volumetric calculation, and work out chargeable weight per bag.
6. Add it up. Goods, China domestic, freight, a duty allowance, a currency buffer, last mile. Divide by twenty.
7. Compare. Against what a comparable bag sells for in your local market. If the gap does not support a margin, stop here. That is the check working.
8. Order. Specify quantities per colour, name an acceptable substitute, ask for photographs before shipping, and ask for a packing list.
9. Pay through a route that leaves a record. Order number, transaction reference, receipt.
10. Wait, and check the stage rather than the days.
11. Document the delivery. Sealed parcel photographed, opening filmed, count against the packing list.
12. Record the numbers. One spreadsheet row: what you paid, what arrived sellable, your real unit cost.

Steps seven and twelve are the ones people skip, and they are the two that decide whether order two is better than order one.

What changes as you grow

The process stays the same. What changes is which parts you carry yourself.

Most people should not skip stages. Each one teaches something the next depends on, and the cost of learning it late is considerably higher. Where the break-even actually sits.

The five things that decide whether this works

After everything above, the short list.

Product choice. Small, valuable for its size, hard to find locally, not regulated. Get this wrong and nothing downstream saves it.

Reading the real price. The table row, not the header. Everything you calculate afterwards inherits this number.

Volumetric weight. The difference between a freight bill you expected and one you did not.

How you pay. A record or a screenshot. This is the whole of your recourse.

Recording what happened. Without it, the second order is another guess, and the third one too.

None of it is complicated. It is a sequence, and the people who do well at this are the ones who run the sequence every time rather than the ones with a secret supplier. The full checklist.

Where to go from here

If you are ordering something for yourself and you just want it to arrive, start from a catalog where the naira price is already the whole price. If you are sourcing to sell, start with a small test order, keep every document, and treat the first order as tuition rather than profit.

Either way, the process above does not change. Only the number of steps you personally carry.