Moving from a working prototype to a first production order is where hardware projects lose months. Almost all of it is avoidable, and almost none of it is about the part you have been evaluating.
Is the part number you tested the part number you can buy?
Sample stock and production stock are not always the same revision. Ask explicitly which revision ships at volume, what changed, and whether the driver you have been using still applies. Then ask for that in writing on the quotation.
How long will it stay available?
A camera module with an eighteen-month life is a fine choice for a demo and a poor one for a product that has to be supported for five years. Ask for the availability commitment and the notice period before end-of-life. A supplier who will not answer this in writing has answered it.
What is the real lead time, from today?
Not the catalogue number — the number for your quantity, this quarter, to your destination. Then ask what it becomes if you double the quantity. If the second answer is dramatically worse, you have found a constraint worth designing around now rather than in six months.
Who owns the customs bill?
DAP and DDP produce very different landed costs and very different amounts of paperwork for your side. Decide which one you want before you compare quotations, or you will be comparing numbers that are not comparable.
Do you have the compliance documents you will be asked for?
CE, FCC and RoHS declarations are issued per product and per revision. Collect them at order time, not when a customer’s compliance team asks — that request always arrives at the worst moment.
What does the calibration variance look like?
For camera modules specifically: ask about lens focus tolerance and colour variation across a production batch. A tolerance that was invisible across three samples becomes a yield problem across a thousand, and it is much cheaper to add a calibration step to your process than to sort units by eye.
Buy a pre-production batch first
Twenty to fifty units from production stock, run through your actual assembly process, will find the problems that a purchase order for a thousand turns into a crisis. It is the cheapest insurance in hardware.