MOQ Meaning – Why small manufacturing orders increase costs

The right order quantity can often drive your costs down and the quality up. This is because larger orders tend to give you more influence and control at a factory level. Factories are rarely totally independent and often rely on other people and services in the supply chain that often influence the focus of a factory. So smaller quantities can almost never really give you the necessary attention to both reduce costs as well as improve quality.

MOQ Meaning Minimum Order Quantity

Take for example a forged brass door lock. The handle may be forged brass so a 5000 piece MOQ is acceptable. But the locks also contain among other things, a small spring. The spring manufacturer makes these with a MOQ of 50,000 pieces due to their small size and he in turn has to adhere to his raw material suppliers MOQ and so on. So in this instance if you want to buy just 200 spare springs you might have problems. If however these are off the shelf springs then you may be ok, but if you want a brand new design then you would be up against this 50,000 pieces MOQ. Other examples include retail packaging for premium beauty products. These will have much higher MOQ.

MOQ is one of the first constraints new importers run into — and it rarely gets simpler as product complexity grows. Component MOQs stack. Assembly requirements add lead time. Managing multiple suppliers to hit the right quantities without over-committing inventory is one of the more difficult parts of manufacturing in China.

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