The supplier vetting scorecard
Twenty-three checks, weighted by what skipping them actually costs, plus six red flags that override everything. It scores the evidence you are holding, not the supplier. Nothing leaves your browser.
This does not score your supplier
It cannot. No web page has seen their production line, and any tool that hands you a confidence number about a company it has never visited has invented it. That number is worse than nothing, because it converts a guess into confidence at the exact moment somebody is about to wire a deposit.
So this scores you: how much of what matters you have actually verified, and which unverified thing would cost the most. A supplier can be excellent and score low here. That just means you do not know it yet.
Five means it can end the company
A weight of 5 sits on the checks where skipping it does not cost you margin, it costs you the money. Paying an account in a name that does not match the business license, or wiring a balance before anyone looked at the goods, are not optimizations. They are the two ways first-time importers lose everything at once.
A weight of 2 is real and recoverable. A supplier's default carton quietly adding a fifth to your freight bill is a bad month, not a bad year. Ranking the gaps by weight is the whole point: with limited time before a deposit, the order you close them in matters more than how many you close.
How to read a supplier's badges
Each badge answers a specific question, and they answer real ones. Knowing which question each one settles, and which ones are still yours to settle, is most of supplier vetting.
| Badge | What it confirms | What you check yourself |
|---|---|---|
| Gold Supplier | A paid membership tier, held continuously for as long as the profile says. A supplier who has carried it for eight years has been trading on the platform for eight years, which is a reasonable signal of continuity. | Manufacturing capability for your product. Pair it with the business license and a look at the line, which is what we do. |
| Verified Supplier | An on-site inspection by an Alibaba-approved third-party auditor, confirming the company exists, the facilities are real and the stated capabilities are broadly accurate. This is genuine verification work and worth weighting. | The audit date, and whether the specific line that will run your product suits it. An audit is a photograph of a company on a day, so check how recent the day was. |
| Trade Assurance | Order-level protection on orders placed and paid through the platform, with refunds where shipment or quality terms written into the platform contract are not met. Use it. | That the order stays inside it. The cover follows the payment, so a transfer made outside the platform leaves the protection behind. See the section below. |
| Assessed / audit report | A third-party report you can usually download in full. | Read the report itself rather than the badge on the profile. It carries a date, a scope and named findings, and those are the useful part. |
Platform programs and their terms change. Treat the shape of this as durable and confirm the current terms on Alibaba's own help pages before you rely on any of it.
The payment-redirect scam, and how to avoid it
Most sourcing scams are not exotic. The one that takes the most money from the most people is this: paying outside the platform voids Trade Assurance. It is the single most common way an importer with protection ends up without it, and it almost never feels like a decision.
The pattern is consistent. The order is agreed on the platform. Then, partway through, a message arrives: the usual account is being audited, there is a new Hong Kong account, please send the balance there. The invoice looks right. The logo is right. Sometimes the email address is one character different from the one you have been using; sometimes the supplier's own account really has been compromised.
The money leaves and there is no escrow behind it, no claim to file, and frequently no company at the other end.
- Never accept a mid-order change of bank details without confirming by a channel you established yourself, on a number you already had.
- The account name must match the business license name. Not the trading name, not a director's name, not a Hong Kong entity you have never been told about.
- A first order paid off-platform has no protection at all, whatever badges the profile carries.
Due diligence: checking a Chinese supplier against the official registry
Chinese companies are on a public government register, and it is free. This is the check that separates a real factory from a shell, and almost nobody importing for the first time does it.
- Get the 18-character Unified Social Credit Code and the company's registered name in Chinese. Both are on the business license. A supplier who will not send the license is answering your question.
- Look it up on GSXT, the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System run by China's State Administration for Market Regulation, at gsxt.gov.cn. It shows whether the company is active, revoked or deregistered, when it was registered, its capital, and its registered business scope.
- Read the business scope against what you are buying. A company whose scope is wholesale and retail trade is a trading company, whatever the profile says. That is not automatically bad. Being told otherwise is.
- Check the registration date against the claimed history. "Twenty years of experience" from an entity registered eleven months ago means the entity is new, and a fresh registration is sometimes how an old set of judgments gets left behind.
- Check enforcement records on the Supreme People's Court list at zxgk.court.gov.cn for judgment defaulters.
The register is in Chinese and the search wants the Chinese name. That is the real barrier, and it is a translation problem rather than an access problem.
Golden samples, and why the word matters
A golden sample is the physical unit both sides agree is the standard: made from production tooling and production materials, inspected, then signed, sealed and dated, with one copy held by you and one held at the factory. Every later argument about quality is settled against it.
Without one, a quality dispute is two parties describing a memory of a sample. With one, an inspector has something to measure against, and the phrase "this is not what we approved" means something specific enough to act on. Approving a sample the factory keeps no sealed copy of is approving nothing, and approving a hand-made sample tells you what their best model-maker can do rather than what their line will produce.
It is the cheapest piece of leverage in the entire process and it has to be created before the deposit converts into production, not after.
Supplier scorecard template, printable
The same twenty-three checks and six red flags as the scorecard above, as a blank supplier vetting template you can print and carry. Useful on a factory floor, at a trade show, or anywhere a phone is the wrong tool. Print this page and you get the checklist and nothing else.
Legal identity
- 5Business license obtained and read
- 4Registered business scope covers what you are buying
- 5Bank account name matches the license exactly
- 2Company age and registered capital checked against order size
Factory or trader
- 5Someone physically walked the production line
- 4The machines that make your product were seen running
- 3You know whether they are the factory, and they know you know
- 2Export history or export license confirmed
Capability for your product
- 5Golden sample approved, in writing, by both sides
- 4A written spec exists with tolerances, materials and finishes
- 3They have made something genuinely similar before
- 2MOQ and monthly capacity confirmed against your forecast
Quality and inspection
- 5Third-party inspection booked before the balance payment
- 3AQL level and inspection criteria agreed in advance
- 3Any required compliance testing identified and scheduled
- 3What happens on a failed run is written down
Commercial terms
- 5Proforma invoice covering price, terms, lead time and Incoterm
- 4The Incoterm is stated, and you know what it makes yours
- 3Tooling cost, ownership and location agreed in writing
- 2Carton dimensions, weights and packing confirmed
Payment safety
- 4Deposit and balance split, with the balance after inspection
- 5Payment details verified by voice on a number you sourced yourself
- 3A purchase contract exists, in English and Chinese
Red flags (any one of these overrides everything above)
- They have refused or repeatedly deferred a factory visit or third-party inspection
- Bank details arrived in a message and differ from the license or a previous invoice
- You are being asked to pay a personal account, or through a channel with no recourse
- The price is far below every other quote and nobody can explain why
- They will not provide the business license
- You are being pushed to pay today over a deadline they invented
The number beside each line is its weight, 1 to 5, and it is what makes this a scorecard rather than a checklist: with limited time before a deposit moves, the order you close the gaps in matters more than how many you close. The red flags are unscored on purpose. A red flag is not a deduction that green ticks can outweigh.
We run this list for a living
Pulling licenses, reading scopes, walking lines and booking inspections is the job, and it is a great deal faster when someone is already in the country. Send us the report from this page and we will tell you which gaps we would close first.