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How to Check If a Product Is Made in China?

Companies love outsourcing their manufacturing to China but they know their customers don’t like it. They’ll try every trick in the book to make themselves look like a good old-fashioned, homegrown company while at the same time shutting down local manufacturing and outsourcing jobs overseas.

In a perfect world, e-commerce stores would clearly display the country of origin right there on the product page, but most don’t or straight up lie about the origin. So here’s some tips to help you work out if something is made in China:

Look for confusing or deceptive labelling

If a company uses intentionally confusing or deceptive phrases on the packaging, it can be a good indication that their products are made in China.

Some common examples to look out for:

  • Designed in XYZ
    Common with brands that have moved their manufacturing overseas to cut costs but still has offices/HQ in the original country.
  • Designed with love in XYZ
    🙄 As if that makes a difference!
  • Assembled in XYZ
    Usually means the product was 99% made in China, but a small piece was added in a factory closer to home.
  • Made in PRC
    PRC stands for People’s Republic of China, so they’re technically telling the truth but in an underhanded way.
  • Made in Hong Kong
    For a time, Hong Kong benefited from the “One country, two systems” policy that allowed it greater freedoms than the Chinese mainland. However, this is no longer the case. “Made in Hong Kong” means made in China.
  • Made in Macau
    Similar to Hong Kong, Macau is a Special Administrative Region of China, so essentially means “Made in China”

Use the resources other people have created

There are a number of sites and databases trying to tackle the problem of where our products are actually coming from. Here’s some of the best ones to try:

Don’t trust AI generated answers

AI generated answers are frequently completely wrong or try to generate an answer from incomplete data. For example if you ask Google Search “Where are Fiskars scissors made?” it will confidently tell you that all Fiskars scissors are made in Finland. In reality the truth is a bit more complicated. If you buy Fiskars scissors from within Europe then they’re likely made in Finland. If you buy from the USA, they used to be manufactured in the USA but many are now manufactured in China.

You can cut through a lot of the BS by using some of the Google Search tricks we’ve outlined below.

Research using Google Search tricks

Google Search was once a useful research tool. It’s now become an AI and SEO infested nightmare! But there are a few tricks you can use to cut through the noise.

Search operators

Use search operators to refine and narrow down your results and get answers from real people.

Here’s some useful Google Search operators to try. Have a go at pasting any of the following into Google Search:

  • site:reddit.com where are fiskars scissors made?
    This will narrow down your search to user generated answers only from Reddit. You can replace reddit.com with any website you trust.
  • after:2022 where are fiskars scissors made?
    Dont get thrown off by answers from 10 years ago. This search operator can be used to ensure you only get the most recent answers.
  • kitchen scissors -china
    The minus operator tells Google to remove any results that contain that word.

You can try combining search operators. For example, to show products from amazon.com that don’t contain the word “China” you could do this:

site:amazon.com kitchen scissors -china

Web only mode (the udm=14 trick)

Avoid Google’s unhelpful AI answers by searching in “Web only” mode. You can either do this by clicking on the “Web” button when you do a search or adding &udm=14 to the end of the Google Search URL.

Screenshot showing Google Search web only mode

Google Search’s “udm=14” trick lets you kill AI search for good

Check the Q&A section on Amazon product pages

Popular products on Amazon often have a Question and Answer section which can be a gold-mine for doing your research. Some product pages also have a search bar which checks the product description, product Q&A’s and product reviews.

Amazon search bar screenshot

Try any of the following in the search bar and see if you get any hits:

  • china
  • made in
  • manufactured in
  • country

Don’t trust the “Country of Origin” on Amazon

For a while Amazon flirted with the idea of showing “Country of Origin” information right there on the product page. This still exists on some product pages but it’s often wrong or misleading as they don’t appear to check or verify the information.

Don’t bother checking the barcode

There is some truth to the idea that a barcode number reveals country information. Fact checking website Snopes did a great article on this if you want to know more: Can You Determine a Product’s Country of Origin by Its Bar Code?

The TLDR on this is that barcodes do contain a country code. But the barcode is not a foolproof way of identifying the country of manufacture as “companies can manufacture products anywhere in the world…Prefixes do not identify the country of origin for a given product” GS1 barcode standards.

Don’t buy products with gibberish names

You may have noticed e-commerce stores filling up with junk products from brands like:

  • LURNYX
  • CAFFLEFYLE
  • JOKBENYG

These gibberish made-up-words, often in all capitals, are used by Chinese manufacturers and drop-shippers to list their products directly on Western e-commerce stores as they are much easier to trademark than brand names containing real words.

NYT: All Your Favorite Brands, From BSTOEM to ZGGCD
SlashGear: The Reason Amazon Sellers Have Such Strange Brand Names

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