Advice on verifying a Chinese supplier usually stops at "check the business registration". That is correct and also incomplete: the registry confirms an entity exists, not that the entity in front of you is the one you are paying, and not that it makes anything.
The checks below are ordered by how much they cost you and how much they settle.
The five checks, and what a clean answer looks like
| Check | Ask for | A clean answer | Red flag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who you are contracting with | The registered company name, and the business registration number | Contract, invoice and bank account all name the same legal entity | Bank account held in a personal name, or in a company name that appears nowhere on the contract |
| Whether they manufacture | The factory address, and a live video walkthrough of the line | They can show the machines being assembled, and show the specific model you asked about | "Our factory" but no walkthrough, only catalogue photographs |
| Third-party assessment | The assessment report from the inspection body | A report from an independent inspection body, for the site you are buying from | A scanned quality mark with no report behind it, or a report for a different address |
| Published engineering data | Capacity and power, in writing | Both figures stated for the model you are buying | A catalogue that lists capacity and never power |
| Spare parts and after-sales | A parts list, and lead time for wear parts | Named parts, with lead times and a route to order them | "Parts are always available" with nothing specific |
The order matters. The first check settles more disputes than the other four combined, because most payment fraud against importers is not a fake factory — it is a real-looking quotation paid to the wrong account.
Check one, done properly
The registration systems that show up when you search for this are the national enterprise credit information system and the commercial databases built on top of it. They are the right starting point. Two things to do once you are in them:
- Search the registered name, not the brand name. Trading names and brand names often differ from the registered legal entity, and a search on the brand can come back empty even when the company is entirely legitimate.
- Make the payment destination the last step of the check, not the first. Before you transfer anything, confirm the account name matches the registered entity on the contract.
Where a company publishes its registered name on its own site, that is a signal worth reading: it means someone decided the registration is something a buyer is allowed to check. Our own registered business name and trading name are both published on our About page, alongside the entity details, so that this check can be run against us rather than only described to you.
Why "do you have a certificate" is the wrong question
Buyers often lead with a certificate question and get a confident yes, which settles nothing — a document nobody can verify is worth less than a factory walkthrough. The better question is not what do you have but how would I confirm it. A supplier with genuinely checkable credentials can answer the second question immediately, and one without them will answer the first question and avoid the second.
The three checks you can finish in an afternoon
- Look up the registered name, and look at what the entity actually does.
- Ask for a live walkthrough of the specific model you intend to buy, not a catalogue video.
- Ask for capacity and power in writing, then ask which model they recommend and why. A supplier who recommends a machine that is wrong for your volume is either guessing or overselling, and both show up in the written answer.
What we will not tell you
We will not tell you that a supplier is fraudulent, and we will not describe ourselves as the only safe option — this page is about a method, not about us. What we will do is make our own checks easy: the entity details are published, the assessment report is available on request, and the published capacity and power figures for every model are on this site, so that the last two checks can be run on us in a few minutes.