How to Verify a Chinese Supplier Is a Real Factory — A Working Checklist
“How do I review the manufacturer and find a reliable supplier in China?”
— Quora“How do you actually verify a China supplier?”
r/FulfillmentByAmazon“7 Ways to Verify Chinese Suppliers Are Factories, Not Trading Companies”
— recurring thread title, Redditr/sourcing_from_china
Buyers ask this constantly, and most answers they find are the same recycled list: check the licence, ask for a video, look at the certifications. Not wrong — just not operational. It tells you what to check and never what a real answer looks like.
Below is the order I actually work in, arranged by cost: the free checks that eliminate the most candidates come first, and the ones that cost money come last.
Before anything else: decide whether you need a factory at all
This sounds like heresy in a market where everyone sells “factory direct”, so it is worth stating plainly: a trading company is not automatically worse. On small first orders — a few thousand dollars — a good one is often the better counterparty: lower MOQ, faster English, someone to consolidate three suppliers into one shipment, and a reason to fix problems because they want your second order.
What matters is not which is better. It is knowing which one you are talking to, because the two fail differently: a factory can change a process without telling you; a trading company can substitute a different factory between your sample and your bulk order.
The goal is therefore not “find a factory”. It is: know exactly who is making your product before you pay a deposit.
Step 1 — Get the business licence and read the business scope
Ask for the 营业执照 (business licence) — not the ISO certificate, not the platform profile. Two fields do the work:
- 经营范围 (business scope). The highest-value line in the document. A manufacturer’s scope contains production language — 生产 / 制造 / 加工 — naming what it may make. An intermediary’s contains selling language — 销售 / 批发 / 零售 / 贸易 — and no production wording at all. No word meaning “manufacture” anywhere in the scope → you are not talking to a factory.
- 住所 (registered address). Compare with the production address you were given. An office tower is normal for a trading company and a warning sign for a claimed factory.
成立日期 (establishment date) and 注册资本 (registered capital) are routinely over-read — an old registration date means the entity has existed, nothing more.
What a refusal sounds like: “our licence is confidential”, “we can only send the English profile”, “I’ll send it after the deposit”. Licence details are public record in China. There is no legitimate reason to withhold them from a prospective buyer.
Step 2 — Cross-check it on the official registry
Take the Chinese company name exactly as written and search it on 国家企业信用信息公示系统 (gsxt.gov.cn) — the official national enterprise credit registry, free, and in Chinese. You are confirming three things: the entity exists and is active (not revoked, not on the abnormal-operation list); the business scope matches what you were told; and the name you were given is the real legal entity, not a trading arm with a similar name.
Step 3 — Run the three-name test
Three names must be the same entity, or you must be told in writing why they are not: the storefront / quotation name, the pro forma invoice name, and the bank beneficiary you are asked to remit to.
If the bank beneficiary is a different company from the one that quoted you — or a personal account — stop. This is the cleanest fraud filter there is and it costs nothing to run. A legitimate group may invoice from a separate export entity; that is fine, but it has to be disclosed before you pay, not discovered when you read the remittance details.
Step 4 — Separate the registered address from the production site
Ask directly: “What is the address of the workshop that will produce my order?” Then check whether it is an industrial site, and whether it is anywhere near the registered address. A supplier can legitimately have several sites; one who cannot name any is telling you something.
Step 5 — Ask process questions, not yes/no questions
This is where real factories separate themselves, and it costs nothing. Ask about the process for your product:
- Which machines run this part, and how many are on the floor?
- Monthly capacity of that line?
- Which operations are in-house, which outsourced — moulding, printing, plating, assembly?
- Changeover time when switching SKUs?
- What raw material grade, and who supplies it?
A factory answers with numbers and trade-offs. An intermediary answers with reassurance, or with “let me confirm with the factory” — a phrase that on its own tells you who you are talking to.
Step 6 — Ask for a live, time-bound video walk-through
Not a recorded tour, not a showroom. Ask for a live call with specific shots, in this order: the gate sign with the company name; the raw material store for your material; the line running; the finished-goods area with cartons; a wide shot so you can judge the building’s scale.
Then ask something that requires reading on the spot — the label on a bag of resin, a work order on a machine, the date on a QC sheet. A staged tour collapses quickly under a specific, unscripted request. Conversely, an untidy floor is not a red flag; some of the best plants I have been in are not photogenic.
Step 7 — Verify certificates at the issuer, not in your inbox
Certificates arrive as PDFs, and PDFs are trivial to edit. Take the certificate number and check it on the issuing body’s own register. Then check two things buyers routinely miss: the certified entity name matches the business licence entity, and the certified scope actually covers your product — an ISO 9001 for “metal hardware” says nothing about your food-contact plastic part.
The same applies to market compliance: FDA or LFGB for food contact, CE for electrical goods. Ask which standard, which test report, which lab, which date. [TODO: 若 Walker 有常用发证机构核验入口清单（如 SGS / TUV / BV 证书查询页 URL），可在此补一个列表]
Step 8 — Check that they actually export
Ask for evidence of recent export activity to your region — a shipping document, an export record, or a reference customer you may contact. You are checking two things: that they export at all, and that the shipper name is the company you are contracting with. No export record is not dishonesty; it just means someone will be learning on your order.
Step 9 — Test batch consistency before you commit volume
One sample proves one thing: somebody made one good unit. It says nothing about the next five thousand. A widely repeated rule of thumb in buyer communities is to order 15–20 sample units rather than one or two, from the same batch where possible, and test across them. Variation within a small run is the cheapest available signal about a full production run.
Step 10 — Only then, consider paying for an audit
Paid verification has a real market rate and a real use. [TODO: 验厂价目 — 需 Walker 确认是否引用。信号报告中多来源一致的区间为：代理方初始验厂 USD 200–500（0.5–1 天）；第三方 SGS/BV/TUV USD 500–2,000（2–3 天）。是否写进正文请 Walker 定，未确认前保持 TODO。]
Equally important: when you do not need one. For a low-risk standard item from a factory you have already shipped with, a pre-shipment inspection tells you more than an audit. An audit tells you about a facility; an inspection tells you about your goods — and an advisor who earns nothing from either is the one most likely to say so.
The compressed version
Free, under an hour, and they eliminate most bad candidates:
- Read the 经营范围 on the business licence. No word meaning “manufacture” → not a factory.
- Check the entity on gsxt.gov.cn using the exact Chinese name.
- Match three names: quotation, invoice, bank beneficiary.
- Ask three process questions about your specific product. Numbers or vague? That is your answer.
Everything after that — video call, certificate check, audit — is confirmation, not discovery.
Tell me what you need sourced, the target quantity and the destination port. Scope and fee are confirmed in writing before any work starts. → Request a quote