Guides / Sourcing
The deposit is the moment your leverage is highest and your information is thinnest. You have a quotation, a price and a chat history, and you are about to send money to a company you have never visited. Verifying the supplier is not a judgement about the person you are talking to. It is a short list of claims — the legal entity, the factory behind it, the certificates, the payment route and the specification — each of which can be checked independently of what you are told.
A Chinese prefab supplier can be verified before a deposit in five checks: match the quoting entity to its public business registration; establish whether you are buying from a trading company or a factory, and who controls production; resolve every certificate number with the body that issued it; confirm that the contracting company, the invoicing company and the bank account holder are the same legal entity; and make the proforma invoice carry the specification that the deposit is buying.
None of the five requires a trip to China. Four are public-record or document checks you can run yourself, and the fifth is one written question. What the checks do not do is prove the batch you eventually receive — that is what first-piece approval and pre-shipment inspection are for, and we describe how we run our own on the inspection page.
Most sourcing disputes start the same way: the company that quoted, the company that holds the bank account, and the company named on the shipping documents turn out to be three different names, and nobody noticed until the deposit had already left the account. By then the money is committed and the buyer is negotiating from behind.
The gap exists because of how the supply base is organised. One factory may be reached through several exporting companies; a trading company may quote for five factories; an agent may describe itself as a manufacturer because that is what buyers ask for. None of those arrangements is illegitimate in itself. What is dangerous is paying a deposit without knowing which one you are dealing with, because the answer decides who your contract binds, who is accountable for a batch that fails, and whom you would have to pursue in a dispute.
So the useful question is not “is this supplier a scam” but “which claims in this quotation can I check myself, and which are only assertions”. The five checks below are ordered by how much they change your position.
Every legally operating company in China holds a business licence (营业执照) carrying a Unified Social Credit Code (统一社会信用代码), an 18-character identifier that replaced the older separate licence numbers. The registration is public, free to search, and published by the market regulation authority through the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (国家企业信用信息公示系统, gsxt.gov.cn). It is a Chinese-language service, and it is the first place an unverifiable supplier reveals itself.
Ask for the licence itself, with the credit code legible, and then look it up yourself. Check four things:
The point of this check is not to disqualify trading companies. It is to establish the exact legal name that your contract, your invoice and your payment will all have to agree on.
Many reputable exporters are trading companies, and for a buyer assembling a project across several product lines a trading partner can be the better counterparty: one contract, consolidated loading, and engineering staff who read drawings. What matters is not the label but whether the company controls production and inspection, and whether it will tell you which factory will make your order.
Five questions separate a trading partner from a pass-through:
A company that answers all five is a company you can hold to something. A company that cannot name the factory, or that answers technical questions by forwarding them to a third party it will not introduce, is telling you where the accountability will sit if something goes wrong. If the producing factory is a separate legal entity, look it up in the same registry, and get the relationship between the two companies in writing before you pay.
A certificate PDF is a picture of a document. Verification means the certificate number resolves in a database run by the issuing or accreditation body, and that the company name on it matches the registration you checked in step one. Names, scopes and validity dates are where the gaps usually appear.
Our own certifications page lists the categories of documentation we prepare for buyers and states plainly that specific certificate numbers and issuing bodies are confirmed per order. That is the honest shape of the answer: the categories are standard, the numbers belong to a specific supplier, a specific factory and a specific date, and are only worth what the issuer’s database says they are worth.
The contracting entity, the entity on the proforma invoice, and the holder of the bank account you pay must be the same legal entity. Any divergence is a question to resolve in writing before the deposit leaves, never after.
The pattern to watch for is a change of account details that arrives late in the negotiation, often as a message that the company account is unavailable and payment should go to another company, a personal account, or an account in a third country. Confirm any change of bank details through a second channel you used earlier, not in the same thread that requested it — and treat a request for speed as part of the signal rather than a reason to skip the check.
For a first order it is worth choosing a payment structure that keeps the money conditional rather than relying on a promise:
None of these replaces the checks in steps one to three. They change what happens if the supplier is honest about the product and careless about the paperwork, which is a far more common failure than outright fraud.
A deposit converts into a specification. If the specification is not written down, the deposit is buying a promise, and no amount of later inspection can recover a product that was never defined. Before paying, the proforma invoice should carry: unit type and external dimensions; panel core, thickness and steel sheet gauge; frame section and galvanizing method; floor build-up; door and window schedule; electrical scope; surface finish; quantity; the loading plan per container; delivery term; lead time; packing; the documents to be issued; the inspection scope and who performs it; and the payment schedule.
Two clauses are worth insisting on at this stage. First, a first-piece approval: the first unit or sample is assembled, photographed against the drawing and approved by you before the batch is released, and the approved unit defines the standard for the run. Second, a stated drawing revision number, so that “as per drawing” in the contract refers to one specific document rather than to whatever the factory has on file. Our five inspection steps describe how that is evidenced on our own orders, including the measurement photographs that are taken per order rather than replaced with a stock example.
Most of what gets described as intuition about a supplier is one of these, and each can be tested instead of argued about:
The checks are small if they are done in order. This is the sequence we suggest to buyers running a first project alongside their normal work:
Only then pay the deposit. The order of the steps is the point: each one narrows what you can still be surprised by, and the last one is the only step that is difficult to reverse.
It is worth being precise about the limits, because a buyer who expects more from these checks than they can deliver ends up relying on paper instead of process:
Our inspection page makes the same admission in its own words: inspection reduces the mismatch risk, it does not remove it. A supplier who offers you certainty about a factory in another country is offering you something that does not exist.
We are a trading and engineering company rather than a factory, so the shape of this article is also the shape of our own role. Our about page sets out the six steps we use to vet a factory partner before we quote: business licence and export history, a workshop and equipment walk-through, material traceability against mill sources, sample or first-piece approval, in-process spot checks, and a documentation review before shipment. Our inspection page covers the pre-shipment stage and states what we do not claim — no independent laboratory testing by default, no certificates we have not seen, no zero risk.
If you are already holding a quotation and a folder of certificate PDFs from another supplier, send them over. We will tell you which claims can be resolved at the issuer and which cannot — including the ones in our own paperwork that depend on a specific order. That is a more useful first conversation than a price, and it is the one we would rather have.
Send a quotation or drawing for review
If the unit type itself is still open, the detachable versus flat-pack guide answers that question first, and the products overview covers the rest of the range.
Run five checks in order. Match the quoting company to its public business registration and note the exact Chinese legal name. Establish who controls production and which factory will make your units. Resolve every certificate number with the body that issued it rather than accepting the PDF. Confirm that the contracting company, the invoicing company and the bank account holder are the same legal entity. And make the proforma invoice carry the full specification, the drawing revision number, the loading plan and the inspection scope, so the deposit buys a defined product rather than a promise.
Ask for the business licence with its Unified Social Credit Code visible, an 18-character identifier carried by every legally operating company in China, then look the code up yourself in the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (国家企业信用信息公示系统, gsxt.gov.cn), the free public register published by the market regulation authority. Confirm four things: the registered Chinese name, that the status shows as operating rather than deregistered or revoked, that the registered business scope covers the product or the activity you are relying on, and the establishment date. A company that will not send a licence with a legible code, or whose code resolves to a different name, has answered the question for you.
A bank transfer is safe to the extent that the account holder is the same legal entity that signed your contract and issued your proforma invoice. Check that identity in writing before you send anything, and treat a change of bank details arriving late in the negotiation as a separate verification task: confirm it through a second channel you used earlier, never in the same thread that requested the change. For a first order, consider a structure that keeps the money conditional, such as a documentary credit under the ICC’s UCP 600 rules, an escrow service, or a staged schedule that releases the balance against the pre-shipment inspection report and a copy of the bill of lading.
Only the parts of it you can resolve at the source. For most construction products the CE mark is the manufacturer’s own declaration rather than something a body issues, so the checkable items are the Declaration of Performance and, where a notified body is involved, its four-digit identification number, which can be looked up in NANDO, the European Commission’s database of notified bodies. If you are shown a document titled CE certificate issued by a laboratory you cannot find in any official database, you have not verified anything: you have been handed a picture of a document.
Take the certificate number and the name of the certification body and look them up in IAF CertSearch, the international certificate database run by the International Accreditation Forum. Confirm three things: that the certification body is accredited, that the certificate is inside its validity dates, and that the scope covers the product and the site you are buying from. Then compare the certified company name with the registration you checked earlier. A certificate that cannot be found in the issuer’s own database is not evidence, whatever the PDF looks like.
Ask for reports that name the standard, the testing laboratory and the specimen. Fire performance should reference a classification standard such as EN 13501-1 and describe the specific panel build-up tested. Corrosion claims should reference a test standard such as ISO 9227 neutral salt spray or ASTM B117, together with the exposure duration and the coating system tested. Read the specimen description rather than the headline result: a report for a 50 mm panel does not cover a 75 mm panel, and a report for a different coating system does not cover yours.
Do not pay until it does, or until you have a written explanation you can verify. In a normal transaction the contracting entity, the entity on the proforma invoice and the account holder are the same legal entity, and a divergence means your contract does not bind the party receiving your money. Requests to pay a personal account, a different company, or an account in a third country are the pattern most often described in deposit disputes, and the arrival of that request is itself the signal to stop and re-verify rather than to speed up.
No, and a supplier who says otherwise is telling you something useful. Verification covers the entity and the paper: who you are contracting with, what they are registered to do, and whether their certificates resolve at the issuer. The quality of the batch is a separate process, controlled by a written specification, a first-piece approval before the run, and a measured pre-shipment inspection on the actual production run. Verification reduces the risk of paying the wrong company; inspection reduces the risk of receiving the wrong product. You need both, and neither one removes the other’s risk.