How to verify a Chinese supplier — in the order that actually matters

Most verification advice is a flat list: check the licence, check the certificate, ask for a video call. Lists are easy to write and useless to act on, because they do not tell you what to do when two items disagree.

What follows is ordered by cost and by what each layer can rule out. Stop as soon as a layer answers your question; do not pay for layer five to answer a layer two question.

Layer 1 — The legal entity (free, ten minutes)

Take the Chinese company name off the business licence and look it up in the national enterprise credit registry. You are establishing one thing only: does this entity exist, and is it active?

A code that fails the GB 32100 checksum was not issued by the registry. A name that returns no filing is a name, not a company.

Layer 2 — The business scope (free, five more minutes)

Still on the same filing. Read the 经营范围 field. Manufacturing wording (生产, 制造, 加工) means manufacturing is legally permitted. Wholesale and retail wording (销售, 批发, 零售) means you are looking at a trading entity.

If it says trading and the salesperson said factory, you have found the disagreement that matters. Resolve it before anything else.

Layer 3 — The permit at the address (free to check, hard to fake)

For any process with an environmental footprint — coating, plating, moulding, dyeing, printing — the operating site holds a pollutant discharge permit, tied to a specific address and a permitted output.

A trading company does not hold one. And a permit for one address does not authorise production at another, which makes it a useful cross-check when the licence address and the visit address differ.

Layer 4 — Export behaviour (free to cheap)

Customs registration shows whether the entity may import and export, and carries a credit rating, including whether it is listed as dishonest. Shipment records — in practice US bill-of-lading data — show whether it actually ships, what it ships and at what scale.

Registration says can. Shipments say does. Coverage is strongest for US-bound cargo, so a thin record may mean a business shipping to Europe rather than a business that is not real.

Layer 5 — The site (the expensive layer, and the only one that is physical)

Everything above is paperwork and databases. None of it establishes that the factory in the video is the factory that will make your order.

A visit answers what nothing else can:

• Does the sign above the gate match the licence name?
• Is this a production site, an office, or a residential unit?
• Is the line running, on something resembling your product?
• Who is physically there?

This is also the layer buyers most often fake to themselves, by accepting a video walkthrough. A walkthrough can be filmed in somebody else’s plant, and the supplier controls the camera.

Layer 6 — The product itself (a different discipline)

Inspection against a written specification is not verification. It answers “do these goods conform”, not “is this company real”. If your specification is not written down with numbers in it, no inspection can help you — and the supplier’s definition of “the same” will quietly become the one that applies.

The two rules that matter

Do not skip to the expensive layer. A site visit is worthless as a first step and decisive as a last one.

Treat every disagreement between layers as the finding. Licence says trading, storefront says factory. Claimed capacity exceeds the permitted output. Address in the filing is not the address you were given. Those mismatches are the actual signal; each individual document on its own proves very little.

Last checked 2026-10