The Canton Fair buyer prep checklist
Canton Fair is the largest trade show on earth. About 25,000 exhibitors across roughly 1.6 million square meters at the Canton Fair Complex in Pazhou, Guangzhou. If you walk it flat out, spending sixty seconds per booth, it takes about three weeks. You have five days per phase.
Which is to say: your outcome at Canton Fair is decided almost entirely by preparation. The buyers who come home with real orders, clean vendor lists, and next-year relationships are the ones who did their homework on the plane. The buyers who come home with 400 unlabeled photos and a stack of business cards they can't remember collecting are the ones who winged it.
Here is a working checklist. I've split it by timeline: two weeks out, one week out, on the ground, and post-fair. Adapt as needed.
The three phases of Canton Fair
Before anything else: know what you're going for. Canton Fair runs three phases each season (spring in April/May, autumn in October/November), separated by roughly a week of teardown-and-rebuild between them. Each phase covers different product categories. Booking a hotel and flying in for Phase 1 when you source home goods is a five-day mistake.
| Phase | Typical dates (autumn) | What's there |
|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 | Oct 15 – Oct 19 | Electronics, hardware, machinery, vehicles, chemicals, building materials, lighting |
| Phase 2 | Oct 23 – Oct 27 | Consumer goods, gifts, home decor, kitchenware, ceramics, glassware, furniture, bathroom |
| Phase 3 | Oct 31 – Nov 4 | Textiles, garments, shoes, luggage, medical, food, office supplies, sports, toys |
Dates shift slightly year to year but the category split is stable. Cross-check the official schedule on cantonfair.org.cn for the exact days. If you source across phases (a lot of buyers do consumer electronics + housewares + textiles), plan for a two- or three-week trip with a real hotel switch built in.
Two weeks before you fly
Visa or transit-free
China's 240-hour visa-free transit policy covers most Western passports if you have an onward flight to a third country. Guangzhou Baiyun is an eligible port. If your trip is under ten days and you're willing to fly out via Hong Kong or Bangkok, you don't need a business visa. Longer than that or bouncing back through Beijing: get an M visa (business), not a tourist L. Processing is one to two weeks at most consulates.
Hotels
Book Pazhou. If Pazhou is full, book Zhujiang New Town and taxi in. Do not book near the airport (an hour each way in traffic) and do not book Guangzhou East station area (also far). Hotels near the Complex sell out four to six weeks before Phase 1 and quadruple their prices. Book by August for October Phase 1.
Category shortlist
Use the Canton Fair website's exhibitor search to build a spreadsheet of the 30–80 booths you actually want to visit. Filter by hall, category, and country of origin (Zhejiang for small electronics, Guangdong for large electronics and plastics, Fujian for stone and shoes, Shandong for machinery). This list becomes your day-1 route.
One week before
What to install on your phone
- WeChat. Every vendor communicates on WeChat. Your email will be ignored. Set up your account before you land (WeChat verification is easier when you're outside China and can receive an SMS on your home carrier). Add a proper English profile photo and a company name so vendors know who added them.
- Baidu Maps or Amap (Gaode). Google Maps does not work in mainland China and is wrong even where it appears to load. Baidu is what Didi drivers use.
- Didi. The Chinese Uber. Set up an international-friendly account (there's an English UI). Link a credit card while you're still on home Wi-Fi.
- Canton Fair official app. Has the venue map, exhibitor list, and a barcode scanner that reads the badges on booth walls. Genuinely useful for the map alone.
- A business card scanner. You will collect between 100 and 500 cards. Something faster than manually typing them. More on this below.
- A product catalog app. Something you can trust to hold photos, prices, MOQs, notes, and vendor associations all in one place, offline. This is what we built Show Sourcing for. Whatever you use, decide before you land, not on day 2.
- A translator app. Google Translate's offline Chinese pack, or Baidu Translate.
- A VPN. ExpressVPN or Astrill. Test it before you go. If you have a work VPN, it will probably not work inside China.
The badge
Pre-register for a Canton Fair buyer badge on the official site. Bring your passport, a color passport photo (they will ask), and your business card. Onsite pickup is at the Complex on day 1; there's a separate lane for pre-registered buyers that saves an hour of standing.
What to actually pack
- 200 business cards, minimum. Not a typo. You will give one out at nearly every booth you seriously talk to. Have your company name in English and, if possible, Simplified Chinese on the back.
- A big portable charger. 20,000mAh minimum. Your phone will die on day 2 in the afternoon otherwise. You are shooting hundreds of photos, running maps, and hitting the Canton Fair app every ten minutes.
- A short cable that fits your charger. The one long cable in your bag is not going to be the cable you need at 3pm.
- Comfortable shoes. Broken in. You will walk 20,000–30,000 steps a day on hard tile. This is the single biggest quality-of-life variable on a Canton Fair trip.
- A portable Bluetooth label printer (Phomemo or similar). If you're printing stickers to label physical samples as you collect them, you'll wish you had one on day 3 instead of promising yourself you'll "sort it back at the hotel."
- Cash. A few thousand RMB. Alipay and WeChat Pay have improved for foreigners but there will be a moment where they don't work and you need to pay for a taxi.
- A physical notebook. For decisions you don't want lost in the app if your phone dies. War room stuff: order plans, budget totals.
- An empty duffle. For samples. Vendors will hand you fully-boxed physical samples at the booth. If you're serious, you'll leave with 10–30 of them.
- Business-casual clothing. The floor is not formal but you're representing your company. Polo or button-down. Not a t-shirt.
- Immodium, ibuprofen, hand sanitizer. Assume the worst; you'll be fine.
On the ground: how to walk a hall
The mistake first-timers make is walking down aisles. There are hundreds of aisles. You will run out of days before you run out of aisles.
Instead, walk by category. The Complex map shows which halls hold which product categories at which levels. Do all of Bluetooth speakers first, then all of home audio, then all of headphones, then all of chargers. You'll walk more total steps this way, but you're comparing apples to apples in each cluster and you build a real market map of who's serious versus who's a middleman.
Rule of thumb: 60 seconds at a mediocre booth, 5 minutes at a promising one, 15 minutes only if you're seriously going to order. Every minute over that is a minute you're not spending on the next booth.
Signal management
You have three options for connectivity, in order of preference:
- A physical Chinese SIM. Buy one on arrival at Baiyun airport from China Unicom or China Mobile. RMB 100 gets you 30GB and it works everywhere with no VPN needed for local services (Baidu, WeChat, Alipay). You'll want a VPN separately for Gmail and everything else.
- T-Mobile / Google Fi / Ubigi eSIM. Data works, WhatsApp works, everything is routed through home and thus doesn't need a VPN. Slower than local, and expensive if your plan doesn't include China.
- Canton Fair venue Wi-Fi. Exists. Rarely works well. Do not depend on it.
If you're on a Chinese SIM, install and log into your VPN before you leave your home country. VPN apps are frequently pulled from the Chinese App Store and the store swap-out isn't obvious.
The vendor-card problem
By end of day 4, if you're doing this properly, you have 200–500 business cards. What happens next determines whether your trip was worth it.
Naive approach: throw them in an envelope, promise yourself you'll enter them into a CRM when you get home. Failure rate: essentially 100%. Two weeks after you land, half the cards are meaningless because you can't remember which product they were for.
Better approach: scan every card the moment you take it, in front of the vendor, and immediately tag it with the products you just saw. The product photos and the vendor become linked in your catalog before you take another step. This is the actual reason to have a card-scanning app on your phone (see our deeper writeup on what OCR actually works for what to look for). At a minimum, name the card image file with the booth number and category before you move on.
The vendors you'll actually order from are almost never the ones you remember most vividly. They're the ones whose spec sheet you can pull up two weeks later without ambiguity.
Follow-up while still on the ground
Your best-quality quotes come in the 48 hours after you leave a booth, when the vendor still remembers you. Waiting until you're back home to send inquiry emails means you're competing with everyone else's inquiry emails from the same show, all landing in the vendor's inbox in the same week.
The 24-hour rule: every serious vendor gets an inquiry email within 24 hours of the booth visit, from the hotel, before you sleep. The email is short: "Hi Sylvia, met you today at booth 3.1F13 about the JBL-style speaker. Please send full spec sheet + FOB + MOQ + samples for the 4 models we discussed. Regards, [Company]." That's it. Send it, move on.
Do this from the app that's already got the vendor profile and product photos attached. Templates + auto-attached photos means one send per vendor takes about 20 seconds. Batching this at day-end for 20–40 vendors is 15 minutes of work that would take an hour and a half by hand.
Post-fair: the real work starts
You will get back a mix of quotes, sample offers, deflections, and silences. This is normal. Assume roughly:
- 60% of vendors you emailed respond within 5 days
- 25% respond after a follow-up nudge
- 15% never respond, or respond so slowly it's the same thing
Now you re-run your landed-cost math on the vendors that came back with real quotes. This is where the FOB to LDP formula earns its keep. The FOB number you wrote down at the booth is not usually the FOB number that ends up in the quote. Once you have real quotes, plug them into your LDP formula and rank vendors on true landed cost, not on impression.
Then order samples. Do not skip this step. Every category has factories that quote well and produce badly, and there's no way to know which is which without touching the goods. Budget $100–$300 in courier fees per vendor for samples; DHL from Guangzhou to most Western destinations is around $40–$80 per shipment.
The workflow this checklist implies
Every one of the on-the-ground steps above (scan vendor, catalog product, tag with FOB and MOQ, send follow-up email) is a five-second operation with the right app and a fifteen-minute operation with the wrong one. Multiplied by 400 booth interactions, that's the difference between the trip being worth it and the trip burning you out.
Show Sourcing is exactly this workflow. Scan a card, catalog the products at that booth right there, associate them with the vendor, capture FOB + MOQ + package + tariff, and it computes landed cost on the spot. When you get to the hotel at night, the entire day's work is already organized, and email follow-ups are one tap per vendor with the product photos already attached. That's what the app was built for. If any of the above resonates and you want the tool in your pocket at Pazhou, install it now and let your team share the catalog in real time.