How to verify a Chinese supplier before you pay a deposit
Verifying a Chinese supplier before you pay a deposit takes 4 checks, in this order.
- Insured employee count beats a claimed capacity as a size signal.
- "Do you export?" is answered yes by everyone; ask where to, how often, and under which Incoterm.
- Pre-shipment inspection catches problems after the money is spent; during-production inspection is where you can still change the outcome.
Paying a deposit is a decision about evidence. This guide sets out the four checks worth doing, in the order that eliminates the most risk for the least effort.
How the four checks fit together
A supplier enquiry usually arrives as a name, a product and a price. The four checks exist to turn that into three separate facts that can each be confirmed or contradicted, because the failure that costs most is not a bad factory — it is a real company that is not a maker of the thing you are buying.
| Check | Question it answers | What a failure means |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Legal entity | Does the company on the quotation exist, under that name, and is it still trading? | The invoice would be issued by a party nobody has checked |
| 2. Main business | Does that company make the category you are buying, or does it trade it? | Someone else carries the quality risk on your order, and a factory visit would show you a different business |
| 3. Export evidence | Has it actually shipped, and to which markets? | The first order carries risks that a shipping history would already have retired |
| 4. Interview and sample | Can it state capacity, MOQ, lead time and price basis as numbers? | You cannot plan a launch around its capacity, and nothing is left to inspect against |
Run in that order, because the costs are not equal. The first check is a public lookup and takes minutes; the fourth needs an hour of the factorys own time across a time difference. A buyer who runs them in reverse spends the expensive checks on candidates that a free lookup would have removed.
The order also decides what you learn when a supplier fails. A failure at check one is a question about who you are dealing with. A failure at check two is a question about what they do. A failure at check three is a question about track record, which is a manageable risk for a capable domestic-only maker. And a failure at check four is the one worth stopping on, because a factory that cannot state its own numbers does not have numbers you can plan around.
Where a supplier passes all four, what you have is a company that exists, makes the category, has shipped, and can state its figures. That is a shortlist, not an approval — the sample and the inspection are what turn it into an order, and they are the subject of the checks page linked below.
1. Check the legal entity, not the brand
Ask for the legal company name and the unified social credit code, then confirm the entity is active and how long it has operated. Check the insured employee count: a factory claiming thousands of units of monthly capacity with a handful of insured employees is telling you something.
2. Confirm the main business is what you are buying
A valid registration does not mean the company makes your product. Look for the product line on the factory's own materials, the machinery visible in production footage, and certifications relevant to your category.
3. Ask for export evidence
The question "do you export?" is answered yes by everyone. The better question is where to, how often, and under which Incoterm. Import records and customs data answer it for you.
What to do with the answers
Score them honestly. A supplier who says "I do not know yet, I will confirm by Thursday" is more useful than one who produces a confident number on the spot. Uncertainty you can plan around; invention you cannot.
Topics in detail
2 topics from this page have their own page. Each one can be read, cited and updated on its own, without the rest of this page moving.
- The four checks, and what each one provesEach check answers one question, and each document is evidence of one thing. This page states where the evidence stops, which is the part buyers most often overestimate.
- Reference bands for the products you are checkingVerification tells you whether a supplier is what it claims. A reference band tells you whether the number is plausible. The two questions are separate and both are worth asking before an order.
Sources 6 cited
- Method follows our published four-gate verification standard (see /verification/) internal record
- Chinese business registration lookup — National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System
- China Customs (GACC) — the authority behind export records
- ISO standards catalogue — quality and testing frameworks
- Harmonized System heading 9507 (rods, hooks, reels, lures) — US HTS lookup
- EU data protection rules this notice follows — European Commission
Every figure on this page traces to one of these. The same list is declared in the page structured data (schema.org citation) and in the Markdown twin.