Distributors
National and regional players, across general trade, bonded zones and cross-border eCommerce.
What is inside
Not names and email addresses.
Distributors, Tmall Partners, Douyin Partners, importers and channel specialists across China. Each one gets a structured profile: the real categories they run, real volume, commercial terms, operational capacity and our team's read on whether to recommend them, and for what kind of brand.
It is the kind of detail that actually decides whether a partner is the right fit, and it is the kind that never makes it into a pitch deck.
Who is in it
Distributors, TPs, importers and channel specialists across China.
Domestic and cross-border. Online and offline. Niche category specialists in the mix. A name only goes in when we have a real reason to know it.
TPs
Tmall and Douyin Partners running flagship stores, content commerce and livestream.
Importers
Licenses, customs setup and warehousing for general trade and the bonded zone.
Offline operators
KA buyers, regional wholesalers and group-buying operators with real shelf access.
Categories covered
BeautyFood and beverageFashionHomeWellnessMother and babyPetSupplements
Mostly B2C, with B2B when the buyer is in China.
What we record
The fields that decide whether a partnership fits.
Nine groups of fields make up every profile. Together they cover the ground a sales deck rarely does, and the last one is the one clients read first.
Company basics
Legal entity, headquarters, team size, ownership.
Real categories
Not what their website says. The categories we've actually seen them run.
Channels with real volume
Tmall, JD, Douyin, Pinduoduo, Xiaohongshu, offline, cross-border. Which ones are core and which they only dip into.
Footprint
Cities, provinces, warehouses and where the sales team actually sits.
Commercial terms
Margin, exclusivity, payment terms, MOQs, marketing contribution.
Operational capacity
Volume they can realistically handle. Lead times. Customer service. Returns.
Brands they've worked with
Past and present, wherever we have direct visibility.
Reputation signals
What other brands actually say about them, on the record and off. Where they've succeeded, where they've come up short.
Our view
Recommend, recommend with caveats, avoid, or only-if-X.
A fair question
Why we do not sell you access to it.
People ask, reasonably, whether they can just have a login and browse. The answer is no, and the reason is not commercial. A profile is a judgement, and a judgement without the context behind it is worse than no information at all. "Recommend with caveats" means nothing until somebody tells you what the caveats are and whether they apply to a brand shaped like yours.
There is a shelf-life problem too. A profile written eighteen months ago can already be wrong. Partners lose accounts, change categories, get bought, lose the one person who made them good. The work of a shortlist is half retrieval and half re-checking, and the re-checking is the part a subscription cannot do for you.
So Compass is not a product with tiers. It is the thing our team works from when you brief us, and what you receive is the output of that work: a short list of partners, a written view on each, and a conversation about why. Partners who already have an account with us sign in at compass.thechinapath.com.