How to Verify a Chinese Supplier: 8 Checks Before You Wire Money

The 3-minute version

If you only have three minutes before a sales call, run this table first. Any single red flag is a question. Two is a problem. Three is a goodbye.

The rest of this guide is the full version of each check, in the order that catches the most fakes the fastest.

Check 1 · Read the business license

Every registered company in China has a business license (营业执照, yíngyè zhízhào). Ask your supplier for a photo of it — a real manufacturer has sent it a hundred times and will send it again without blinking. A middleman pretending to be a factory will stall, crop, or send someone else’s.

Four fields matter to you, and you can read them with any translation app:

• Unified Social Credit Code (统一社会信用代码) — the 18-digit national ID of the company. Everything else you do keys off this number.
• Company name (公司名称) — the Chinese name. The English name on their invoice must be a romanization of this, not an unrelated brand.
• Business scope (经营范围) — what the company is legally allowed to do. Look for words like 制造 (manufacturing) or 生产 (production). If the scope says 贸易 (trading) only, you are talking to a trading company. That can be fine — but you should know it before you pay factory prices.
• Registered capital (注册资本) — for context only. A high number is not a guarantee; a tiny number combined with “we are a 500-worker factory” is a mismatch worth asking about.

Check 2 · Run the official registry

China keeps a public, free, official registry of every registered company: the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System, run by the market regulator (SAMR). The site is Chinese-only, at gsxt.gov.cn. Paste the company’s Chinese name or the 18-digit code into the search box and open its profile.

What you are looking at, tab by tab:

• Registration info — status must be active (存续/在营). Check the registration date: a “15-year-old factory” registered in 2023 is a new shell.
• Administrative penalties (行政处罚) — government fines. Empty is normal; a stack is not.
• Abnormal operations (经营异常) — companies flagged for failing annual reports or untraceable addresses. One entry is a question; recurring entries are a pass.
• Serious violations (严重违法) — this list is exactly what it sounds like.

The registry also lets you download a stamped official report of the company’s record — useful if you ever need proof for your own compliance file.

Commercial lookups like Tianyancha and Qichacha wrap the same registry data with extras (ownership graphs, lawsuits). Handy supplements; gsxt.gov.cn stays the system of record. And one caution from experience: the official site sometimes rate-limits or throws a captcha from overseas IPs. Use the browser’s translate function, retry at a different hour, and don’t read one failed load as “the company doesn’t exist.”

Check 3 · The five-minute video call

You are not auditing the factory. You are checking that it exists and that the person you are texting works in it. Ask for a video call “to say hello before the order” — five minutes, phone camera, no preparation. Then ask, in this order:

1. “Can you show me the workshop?” — walk to the production floor, not a finished showroom.
2. “Which machines are yours?” — a factory worker answers in specifics. A middleman answers in categories.
3. “Show me out the window” — the surroundings should match the industrial area from Check 4.
4. “Who is next to you right now?” — unscripted humans appear. Rehearsed scripts don’t.

The tells are physical: real factories are loud, slightly messy, half-lit in places, and full of semi-finished goods. A silent, spotless hall with neatly stacked identical boxes is a set. So is a caller who can only show one room and “forgets” the way to the workshop.

Check 4 · Address forensics

Take the address from the license (not from the website — they are often different, and that difference is information) and look at it from above. In Google Maps or Baidu Maps you are checking three things:

• It is in an industrial area, not a residential tower or a rural house.
• The building is large enough to plausibly hold the claimed workforce.
• The same address is not shared by three other “manufacturers” in unrelated categories — a classic one-room trading post signature.

This check costs five minutes and quietly kills a surprising share of pretend-factories.

Check 5 · The payment details tell the truth

Money is where pretending gets expensive, so payment details are where pretenders get sloppy. Three rules:

• The account name must match the license name — in Chinese characters or its pinyin romanization. “Shenzhen Huaxin Industrial Co., Ltd.” can bank as SHENZHEN HUAXIN INDUSTRIAL CO., LTD. It cannot bank as “Wei Zhang.”
• A personal bank account is a hard stop for any order you care about. There is no legitimate reason a company asks you to pay its salesperson.
• A changed account mid-conversation is a hard stop. The classic fraud script: months of normal quotes, then a “new finance department” email with new bank details just before your deposit. Phone the number you had before the change and confirm in writing.

If your order justifies it, pay the first deposit through a platform escrow (Alibaba Trade Assurance) or your agent’s structure, and switch to direct TT only after the relationship is real.

Check 6 · Cross-check the digital footprint

A real manufacturer leaves a long, boring trail. Check that the trail exists and points at the same company:

• Domain age — a whois lookup on their website. Factories rarely launch new websites; scammers launch them weekly.
• Alibaba profile, if present — “Verified Supplier” means someone visited an address at some point. It does not mean the person emailing you works there, or that the profile is still the same company. Treat it as one signal, never as the verdict.
• Consistency — the license name, the bank account, the email domain, the invoice chop. Four different identities across four channels is a costume, not a company.

Check 7 · The sample test

Order a paid sample before the deposit, and treat it as a verification instrument, not just a quality check:

• The sample should arrive with markings that tie it to a production line — a real factory usually can’t help sending it in its own packaging.
• Compare the sample against the quoted specification line by line. Substitutions here predict substitutions in mass production.
• Ask a technical question about how the sample was made. Makers answer with process detail; resellers answer with adjectives.

A sample that is flawless and identical to a catalog photo from a third site is worth one more question: “Is this your own design?”

Check 8 · When to pay someone to go look

For meaningful orders, remote checks are the appetizer; the main course is a person at the gate. Third-party auditors in China charge by the man-day. As of 2026, market rates run roughly $160-$500 per auditor-day depending on the firm, with most importers landing between $220 and $1,000 for one to two days on site; the big international agencies (SGS, Intertek, Bureau Veritas) sit at the top of that range, specialist China firms (QIMA, V-Trust, Sofeast and similar) in the middle, and smaller local outfits below.

Tradesplain earns a commission if you book inspections through our links — the price is the same either way, and our scoring rubric treats affiliate and non-affiliate firms identically. The full disclosure lives on the About page.

Five mistakes that catch smart buyers

1. Trusting the badge. “Gold Supplier since 2011” is a membership, not a security clearance.
2. Verifying once, then relaxing. The scam switch often flips in month six, with the “new bank account” email. Re-verify payment details before every major transfer.
3. Checking the English website instead of the license. Websites are marketing; licenses are law.
4. Overriding the video call with politeness. If the call felt wrong, it was wrong. Suppliers who want your business will happily do a second one.
5. Letting the “sourcing agent” pick the audit target. If you use an agent, book the third-party audit yourself, and tell the auditor which company to visit — not the one your agent suggests.

Walk-away signals

Any of these ends the evaluation, regardless of how good the price is: a personal bank account; a registry status of cancelled or seriously-violating; a refusal to video-show the workshop; a second company name on the invoice that the license doesn’t explain; and pressure to pay “this week only” before your checks finish. There are forty thousand other suppliers. The cheap one that hurries you is not one of them.

FAQ