Almost every supplier on a B2B marketplace describes itself as a manufacturer. Many are not, and that is not automatically a problem — a good trading company can be genuinely useful. What is a problem is not knowing which one you are dealing with, because it changes who controls your quality, who absorbs a price rise, and who is actually accountable when something goes wrong.
Why it matters more than it sounds
When you buy from a factory, the person quoting you controls the production line. When you buy from a trading company, they are reselling someone else's capacity, usually with a margin you cannot see and a relationship you cannot inspect. If your order is small relative to that factory's output, the trading company may have very little leverage over how your goods are made or when they are scheduled.
This shows up in predictable ways. Quality problems take longer to resolve because there is an extra party in the chain. Lead times slip without explanation because your order is being scheduled around larger direct customers. And requests to visit the production line get deferred, because the visit would reveal the actual maker.
None of this means you should refuse to work with trading companies. Sometimes they are the only sensible route — for multi-category orders, for very low quantities, or where the actual factory has no export capability or English-speaking staff. The point is to price and manage the relationship for what it is.
What you can verify from documents
Chinese companies have a business licence carrying a unified social credit code, and that record is a matter of public registry rather than something the supplier controls. It is the single most useful document you can ask for, and a reluctance to provide it is itself informative.
Three things on it are worth your attention. The registered business scope describes what the company is licensed to do, and manufacturing and trading read differently. The registered capital gives a rough sense of scale, though it should be read with care rather than treated as a balance sheet. And the registration date tells you how long the entity has existed, which matters when a company presents decades of experience.
Cross-check the name too. The Chinese legal name is the one that appears on the licence, on the bank account and on the export documents. If the English trading name, the invoicing entity and the bank account holder are three different things, you want to understand why before you transfer any money.
Questions that are hard to answer from a rented office
Document checks establish what a company is registered as. Conversation establishes what it actually does. The useful questions are specific and operational, because they are difficult to answer convincingly if you do not run the line.
- What is your monthly capacity for this specific product? A maker answers in units per month and relates it to line count. A reseller answers vaguely, or with a number suspiciously close to your order.
- Which processes do you do in-house and which do you outsource? Every factory outsources something. A confident, specific answer about what is subcontracted is a good sign. A claim that everything is in-house usually is not.
- Can I see the production line running this product? Not a finished-goods warehouse. The line.
- Who else do you make this for? They may decline to name customers, which is legitimate. How they decline is still informative.
- What is your minimum, and what drives it? Someone who makes the product can explain the constraint — a fabric roll, a firing run, a mould setup. A reseller quotes a number without a reason.
Signals in ordinary correspondence
You learn a lot from how a supplier handles a technical question. Ask something that requires knowing the process — how a tolerance is achieved, why a material behaves a certain way in production, what happens if you change one dimension. A maker answers from experience, sometimes bluntly. An intermediary goes quiet for a day and comes back with an answer that reads like it was relayed, because it was.
Quotation behaviour is similarly revealing. Factories tend to have strong opinions about what they are good at and visible discomfort outside it. A supplier who can quote competitively across unrelated categories is telling you something about their business model, whether or not they intend to.
What to do with the answer
If it is a factory, your leverage is direct and your quality controls apply at the source. Specify tightly, inspect during production, and build the relationship with the people who actually make the thing.
If it is a trading company, decide whether the service justifies the margin. Sometimes it clearly does. If it does, insist on knowing which factory produces your goods and on the right to inspect there. A trading company that will not disclose the maker is asking you to accept an unmanageable risk in exchange for convenience.
If you cannot tell, that is the answer. A supplier who avoids straightforward questions about their own operation before you have paid them anything will not become more transparent afterwards.
Where verification fits in the process
Document checks and structured questions get you a long way, and for a small first order they may be enough. For anything where a failure would be expensive, someone should physically stand in the building — which is what a factory audit is for, and what supplier verification covers as a matter of routine before we place an order on a client's behalf.
Establishing what a company is registered as is one check among several. The rest, mapped against the failures they actually prevent, are in China supplier scams.
On the domestic wholesale platform this question is often not answerable at all: many storefronts are run by trading companies or individual resellers, and nothing on the listing establishes the legal entity behind it. Buying from 1688 covers what that absence costs you and when it stops mattering.
For the full sequence of checks to run before paying a deposit, see how to verify a Chinese supplier.
