Batteries, Liquids and Cosmetics: What You Can Actually Ship From China (and How)

Yes, you can ship batteries from China. Lithium-ion batteries sent on their own travel as UN3480, forbidden as cargo on passenger aircraft but legal on a cargo-only lane at a state of charge of 30% or less, per the 2026 IATA Battery Guidance Document. Most so-called banned products are not banned. They are misrouted.

That distinction is worth money. Believe batteries are banned and you kill a category competitors ship every day. Assume anything moves on a cheap lane and parcels get destroyed. Both mistakes come from one gap: nobody explains which rule is a law, which is a packing instruction, and which is one carrier's preference.

Prohibited, restricted, refused: three different words

When a fulfillment app returns "restricted item," it collapses three different situations into one message.

Truly prohibited. Nothing legal will carry it, anywhere, in any packaging. Shorter list than sellers assume: goods that cannot be made safe in a package, plus whatever the destination country bars outright.

Restricted and shippable. Legal and routine for anyone set up to handle it, provided the goods are correctly classified, packed to standard, marked, labelled and documented. Batteries, perfume, nail polish, aerosols, magnets and cosmetics all live here, and this bucket holds most of what gets called banned.

Refused by one carrier. Legal on other lanes. That carrier chose not to accept the category. The US Postal Service states in Publication 52 that nearly all dangerous materials are barred from international mail. Postal policy, not a global prohibition.

Three fixes: change the product, change the paperwork and packaging, or change the lane.

Batteries: what the rules actually say

Lithium and sodium-ion batteries sit in Class 9, miscellaneous dangerous goods. The UN number depends on one thing: whether the battery travels alone or with the device it powers.

Source: IATA Battery Guidance Document, 2026, based on the 67th edition of the Dangerous Goods Regulations.

Read that table again. A power bank is a battery. A wireless speaker is a device. Two different UN numbers, two different packing instructions, two different answers to "can this fly." IATA classifies power banks as batteries in their own right, not as batteries contained in equipment, because their primary function is powering something else.

Size decides the rest. Lithium-ion cells at 20 Wh or less and batteries at 100 Wh or less take the lighter path, Section II or Section IB depending on the packing instruction. Above that you are into Section IA or Section I, meaning UN specification packaging and full documentation. For lithium metal the thresholds are 1 g of lithium per cell and 2 g per battery. UN3480 caps at 10 kg per cargo-aircraft package in Section IB and 35 kg in Section IA.

One requirement sits underneath all of it. Every cell and battery must have passed the tests in Part III sub-section 38.3 of the UN Manual of Tests and Criteria. Untested cells move only under a State Approval issued under Special Provision A88, which is not something a Shopify seller arranges. Manufacturers and distributors of cells made after 30 June 2003 must make the test summary available, and IATA is explicit that a QR code or URL on the battery, its packaging or the transport document satisfies that.

A factory that cannot produce a 38.3 test summary is not a shipping problem. It is a sourcing problem.

What changed on 1 January 2026

State of charge is the rule that caught people out this year.

Lithium-ion and sodium-ion cells and batteries shipped by themselves, UN3480 and UN3551, must be offered at a state of charge no higher than 30% of rated capacity. Anything above needs written approval from the State of Origin and the State of the Operator under Special Provision A331.

From 1 January 2026 that extended. Under PI 966, batteries packed with equipment must now also be offered at 30% or less, and in Section II the trigger is a watt-hour rating above 2.7 Wh, low enough to capture most consumer cells. Batteries contained in equipment under PI 967 are not yet mandatory: IATA strongly recommends 30%, or an indicated battery capacity of 25% or less, and stops short of requiring it.

The reason is physics, not paperwork. IATA's guidance states that reducing state of charge reduces the potential for a cell to go into thermal runaway. The FAA made the same point in Safety Alert for Operators 25002, describing runaway cell temperatures reaching 500 to 700 degrees Celsius within seconds and lab flame temperatures near a cell of 1,107 degrees.

Practical version: tell your factory the ship-out state of charge before the production run, not after. Bringing a finished batch down to 30% afterwards is slow, manual and paid for by you.

Liquids, aerosols and flammables

Perfume, nail polish, hand sanitiser, aerosol dry shampoo, cleaning sprays. All flammable liquids or gases by classification, and all move by air routinely.

The route most consumer goods take is the Consumer Commodity reclassification. Under IATA Special Provision A112, certain retail-sized goods in Class 2.1, Class 2.2, Class 3 packing groups II and III, and Class 6.1 packing group III can be reclassified as ID8000, Consumer Commodity, shipped under Packing Instruction Y963 with a Class 9 hazard label and the ID8000 mark. That is what lets a 30 ml perfume fly while a drum of the same liquid does not.

Two operator notes. First, classification follows the formulation, not the marketing category. A "natural" room spray with high ethanol content is a flammable liquid. A "water-based" nail polish may not be. The factory's safety data sheet decides your lane.

Second, Y963 quantity limits are strict and per-package, so the compliant version of your order is often a smaller carton than you planned. Volume moves better by sea, where the IMDG Code has governed packaged dangerous goods since it became mandatory under SOLAS on 1 January 2004. If liquids are your core category, the answer is a mixed model: air for launch and testing, sea for restock into 3PL fulfillment.

Magnets are a measurement, not a product

There is no rule about magnets. There is a rule about magnetic fields.

Magnetized material ships as UN2807, Class 9, under Packing Instruction 953. The trigger is a compass deflection test: a package counts as magnetized material if it deflects a compass by more than 2 degrees at 2.1 metres but not more than 2 degrees at 4.6 metres. Above the 4.6 metre figure, air transport needs prior approval from the State of origin and the operator's State.

What matters is the field escaping the finished, padded package, not the grade of the magnet inside it. The same neodymium driver can be general cargo in one carton configuration and a Class 9 dangerous good in another. Shielding and carton layout belong in the packing spec, one reason we treat custom packaging as engineering rather than branding.

Cosmetics: the shipping is easy, the file is not

Here is the reversal most sellers get wrong. Moving cosmetics out of China is usually straightforward, because most creams, serums and powders are not dangerous goods. The hard part is the regulatory file at destination.

United States. Under the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act, facilities that manufacture or process cosmetics for the US market must register with the FDA, foreign facilities included, and those need a US agent. A responsible person, meaning whoever is named on the label, must list every marketed product with its ingredients. FDA began enforcing registration and listing on 1 July 2024. If your name is on the label, that is you.

Enforcement happens at the border. A review of FDA import refusal data found 1,300 batches of imported cosmetics rejected from 42 countries in 2024. The largest cause was not contamination. It was 723 batches marketed with therapeutic claims, which turned a cosmetic into an unapproved new drug on the label alone. Color additives and labelling followed, and skin care was 42.08% of rejections. That is a copywriting problem disguised as a customs problem: "reduces wrinkles" on your product page can be why your shipment is refused.

European Union. Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 puts the obligation on the importer by default. Article 4(5) is blunt: "For an imported cosmetic product, each importer shall be the responsible person" (EUR-Lex). The role can be delegated by written mandate to another party established in the EU, but not avoided.

Before the product goes on sale, that person must hold a cosmetic product safety report drawn up under Annex I by someone qualified in pharmacy, toxicology or medicine, maintain a product information file, and notify the product through the Cosmetic Product Notification Portal. Notification is free, covers the whole EU, and asks for the country of origin, the member state of sale, any nanomaterials and any CMR substances.

None of that is a shipping cost. It is a launch timeline: planning a line into Germany or anywhere else in the EU means the responsible person and the safety report start before your first production order. Customs is moving too, with the EU removing the 150 EUR duty exemption in 2026, covered in the EU de minimis breakdown.

The routing table

Everything above, compressed.

This is where an owned stack earns its keep. Peregrine runs dedicated shipping lines for restricted categories alongside the standard lanes, so a product that one general lane bounces can often still move from our own Shenzhen warehouse across 65+ countries. The honest caveat: availability is product- and destination-specific, so the answer comes from assessing your SKU. Send the product and its SDS or 38.3 report and you get a quote back the same day in 92% of cases, with samples in 5 to 10 days if it clears.

Carrier policy is not law, and it still stops your parcel

The third bucket generates the angriest tickets: the seller is right on the law and still stuck.

Postal lanes are the clearest example. USPS permits only lithium cells and batteries properly installed in the equipment they operate to be mailed internationally. Loose batteries are out. So are perfumes containing alcohol, nail polish and aerosols, all listed among items that may not be sent internationally from the United States. None of those are globally illegal. They are not accepted in that mail stream.

Vapes are the extreme case. The PACT Act amendment defines an electronic nicotine delivery system broadly enough to catch zero-nicotine e-liquids, synthetic nicotine and every component, part and accessory, bars USPS from delivering them to consumers, and adds ATF registration, age verification, adult signature at delivery and monthly state filings. FedEx banned vaping products globally from 1 March 2021 and UPS stopped carrying them in the US from 5 April 2021.

Check the lane, not just the law, before you build a store around a category. A product that is legal everywhere and carried nowhere is still a product you cannot sell.

Never misdeclare. The arithmetic is not close.

There is a version of this article that winks about writing "gift" on the customs form. This is not it.

Declaring a lithium battery as a plastic accessory puts an undeclared dangerous good into a cargo hold with no fire suppression rated for it and no crew awareness that it is there. PHMSA maximum civil penalties run to $102,348 per day per violation, rising to $238,809 where a violation results in death, serious illness, severe injury or substantial destruction of property, held at 2025 levels for 2026. Under 49 U.S.C. 5124, a willful or reckless violation carries a fine and up to five years imprisonment, ten where a release causes death or bodily injury.

Under IATA's framework the shipper is responsible for correct packing, marking, labelling and documentation, and that does not transfer to the forwarder who filled in the form. Any partner offering to declare it as something else is telling you how they will handle your account when something goes wrong.

How to check a product before you build the store

Six steps, in order, before your first production run.

1. Ask for the UN 38.3 test summary for anything containing a cell, at sample stage. A factory that cannot produce it in a week will not produce it in a quarter.
2. Ask for the safety data sheet for anything liquid, powdered, pressurised or scented. The SDS decides the classification, and the classification decides the lane.
3. Get the watt-hour rating per cell and per battery, and whether the battery ships alone, packed with the device, or inside it. That answer moves you between UN3480 and UN3481.
4. For magnets, ask for the packed field measurement, not the magnet grade, then whether shielding brings it under the threshold.
5. For cosmetics, appoint your responsible person and start the safety report before you order stock. In the EU that role defaults to the importer.
6. Price the compliant lane into your margin before you set retail. Run it in the dropshipping profit calculator with the higher freight figure, because learning it after launch is how a profitable product becomes a loss.

Do those six and the category question answers itself. Usually the answer is yes, on a different lane, with better paperwork. Sometimes it is no, and learning that at sample stage costs a week instead of a season. For an assessment against your own SKU, send us the product and we will tell you which bucket it falls in. Picking a partner who answers that honestly is most of what separates a real operation from a reseller, the argument in our China sourcing agent breakdown.