How to Verify a Chinese Supplier Before You Pay

The most expensive mistake in China sourcing is not a bad price. It is paying a supplier who was never going to deliver — or delivering something very different from what was agreed. Almost every painful story we hear from East African buyers begins the same way: the deposit was sent before anyone checked who was receiving it.

The good news is that verification is not complicated. It simply has to happen before money moves, not after. Here is the process we follow for our own clients.

Start with the business licence

Every legitimate Chinese company holds a business licence issued by the local Administration for Market Regulation. Ask the supplier for a copy. A serious company sends it without hesitation; a hesitant or evasive answer is itself a result.

From the licence you can confirm:

• The registered company name in Chinese (this is the name that matters legally — English names are marketing)
• The unified social credit code, an 18-character identifier you can look up in official registries
• The registered business scope — does it actually include manufacturing your product category?
• The registered capital and the date of establishment

If the company was registered three months ago with minimal capital and a trading-only scope, you are not dealing with the factory. That does not always mean walk away, but it means you should know exactly who you are paying.

Confirm whether you are dealing with a factory or a trader

Traders are not automatically bad — good ones solve real problems. The problem is a trader pretending to be a factory, because you lose both price transparency and quality control.

Useful questions to ask:

• Can we schedule a video call from the production floor, today or tomorrow?
• Which machines do you run for this product, and how many production lines?
• Can you share the factory address so we can visit or send someone?

A real manufacturer answers these easily. Evasion, delay or "the factory is far away" are signals worth taking seriously.

Check the trail the company leaves behind

A manufacturer that has exported for years leaves footprints: customs records, exhibition appearances, consistent product listings, and often the same staff names appearing over several years. A shell operation leaves almost nothing. Look for consistency between what the supplier claims and what the public record shows.

Visit — or have someone visit for you

Nothing replaces standing inside the building. A visit confirms in an hour what emails cannot confirm in a month: whether production is actually happening, roughly how many workers are present, the condition of machines, and whether the goods in the warehouse match what you are buying.

This is the core of what we do at Errandnese. Being based in Guangzhou means a factory visit is a normal working day for us, not an international trip.

A simple rule to close with

If a supplier has not been verified, the correct deposit amount is zero. Verification usually takes days, costs a small fraction of any order, and removes the single largest risk in the entire sourcing process.

If you would like help checking a specific supplier, send us their details through our contact page and we will tell you what the records show.