A trading company is not a scam. But if you believe you are talking to a factory and you are talking to a trader, every number in your cost model is wrong by one margin layer, and you will not find out until the second order.
This is the cheapest check in sourcing, and it is the one buyers skip most often. All seven of these can be done from outside China, with public records and one phone call. None of them requires paying an agent, and none of them requires you to read Chinese beyond recognising a few characters.
Chinese company names are built from a location, a trade name, an industry descriptor and a legal form. The descriptor is where the tell sits. Names containing 制造 (manufacturing), 制品 (products), 五金 (hardware) or 塑胶 (plastics) are claiming production. Names containing 贸易 (trade), 商贸 (commerce), 实业 (industry, used loosely) or 科技 (technology) are claiming something else.
This is a tell, not a verdict. Factories set up trading subsidiaries to handle export invoicing, and some manufacturers have "technology" in the name for entirely innocent reasons. But when a company claiming to be a factory has 贸易 in its name, your next six checks should be done properly rather than skimmed.
Every Chinese company has a licence with a scope field listing what it is permitted to do. The wording is specific and it is not decorative. A manufacturer's scope typically includes a phrase like XX的生产 (production of X) or 加工 (processing). A pure trader's scope contains 销售 (sales), 批发 (wholesale) or 零售 (retail) with no production clause.
Ask for a photograph of the licence, not a typed summary. Compare the scope to what they told you they do. This single check settles more arguments than any other, and it takes two minutes.
ISO 9001 certificates can be checked against the certification body's own register, and most bodies are listed in the IAF CertSearch database. What you are checking is not whether a PDF exists — anyone can produce a PDF — but whether the certificate number, the company name and the scope on the certificate all match the supplier in front of you.
Two failure modes matter. Expired certificates are common and usually honest — a renewal in progress is normal. Certificates whose scope covers a different product category are the more serious problem, because they suggest the document was obtained for a different business and is being shown to you as if it applied.
On CE marking, know what you are looking at: for many product directives a manufacturer may self-declare and apply the mark without a notified body, so the absence of an NB number is not automatically a problem. The presence of an NB number that does not resolve in the EU NANDO database is.
A factory answers with equipment: injection moulding machines and their tonnage, the number of assembly lines, the welding process, the surface treatment. A trader answers with adjectives.
The follow-up is what makes this useful: ask which machine makes your part, and what the cycle time is. A production manager knows this without looking it up. Someone relaying messages to a factory does not.
Workshop photographs get reused. A reverse image search on the two or three most impressive photos will occasionally return the same image on a competitor's listing, on a machinery dealer's site, or on a stock photo page. When a supplier's "our workshop" photograph is also on a machine vendor's website, that is not ambiguous.
Do the same check on the certificate photographs. A certificate image with a different company name cropped out of the frame is a specific kind of lie, and it is common enough that it is worth thirty seconds.
A real factory quoting a low unit price will attach a MOQ that reflects its setup cost — tooling, minimum run, material order size. If a supplier quotes a price 18% below everyone else and a MOQ lower than the factories, one of the two numbers is not real. It is usually the price, and it usually becomes real after the sample is approved.
The reverse also holds. A trader with no tooling cost can offer a low MOQ comfortably, because they are buying from whichever factory has stock this week. A low MOQ is not a virtue in itself; it tells you who is carrying the tooling risk.
Not "can you make this" — everyone says yes. Ask about the failure mode: what is the most common defect in this product, what causes it, and what do you do about it in process rather than at final inspection.
A factory has an answer, and it is usually specific and slightly boring: a particular dimension drifts when the mould temperature is not held, so they check it every two hours. A trader forwards the question and comes back with a general answer three days later, or with a promise that quality is guaranteed.
Whether the factory can hold your specification across a full production run. Whether its real monthly capacity matches what it quoted once two other customers are also ordering. Whether it will subcontract part of your order to meet a deadline. Whether the material grade in bulk will match the sample.
Those are production questions, and a listing cannot answer them. Answering them requires either a visit or a live video walk through the line while your product is running — and even then, only an inspection at pre-shipment settles what actually shipped.
Which is the honest split: the seven checks above are free, and they eliminate the suppliers who should never have been in your shortlist. Everything after that costs money, either yours in time or someone's in fees.
No supplier is identified in this entry. Client cases are published with written permission and the wording approved before publication — see the terms.
A remote supplier check is $149 and covers all of them, plus the ones that need a phone call in Chinese.
Send a supplier to check