Checks a buyer can do before paying a supplier.
Short, plain-English guides for buyers sourcing from China. They read public information you can look at yourself, say what each signal shows, and are clear about what none of it proves. No tool is required to follow them.
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Guide 1 · Updated 31 August 2026
Factory or trading company? Five checks a buyer can do.
Most buyers cannot tell whether the company quoting them makes the product or resells it, because the badges that look like verification are mostly paid memberships. These checks genuinely tell the two apart, in rough order of how much each reveals.
- Read the business licence scope
- Judge catalogue depth, not breadth
- Triangulate the price against the domestic market
- Put the address on a map
- Treat badges as memberships, not proof
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Guide 2 · Published 25 August 2026
Trade Assurance will not enforce a claim you never wrote down.
The usual way one of these orders goes wrong is not fraud. It is a performance claim everybody treated as a specification and nobody put in the contract. What to write into the order instead, before the money moves.
- Where the claim has to live
- Turn each claim into a measurement
- Make the approved sample the production standard
- Book the inspection before the balance
- What Trade Assurance actually compares
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Guide 3 · Published 26 August 2026
Which payment routes have recourse, and which are one-way doors.
Almost every unrecoverable sourcing loss has the same shape: the order was fine, and then the money left by a route nobody could reverse. How to rank the routes, and how to read a request to pay somewhere else.
- The routes, ranked by what you can undo
- Why the off-platform wire is the one-way door
- "Pay this personal account instead"
- Release fees, customs holds and ID requests
- What deposit and balance should be paid against
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Guide 4 · Published 26 August 2026
Landed cost: the unit price is usually the small number.
A first import goes over budget in a predictable way. Volume-based freight, the fixed costs a small shipment cannot spread, duty, and a delivery-side fee list nobody mentioned. For light bulky goods the extras routinely exceed the goods.
- Volume decides the bill, not weight
- The fixed costs a small shipment cannot spread
- Duty, and who the importer actually is
- The delivery-side fees nobody quotes
- The three numbers to demand from each quote
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Guide 5 · Published 26 August 2026
The order confirms itself: the deadline that decides most disputes.
A claim can die on the auto-confirmation timer no matter how strong it is on the merits. A seller's review does not pause it, and an expired window is generally not reopened.
- Which clock you are actually racing
- What "we are looking into it" does to it
- File early, withdraw later
- Never confirm receipt on a partial delivery
- Capture the evidence that is about to change
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Guide 6 · Published 12 October 2026
How to find who makes a product from a photo.
A photo leads you to the sellers; finding the maker takes markings, records and a few direct questions. What each method can and can't tell you, and why a visual match is a lead rather than proof.
- Start with what is printed on the product
- Run a visual search for retail listings
- Search the B2B marketplaces by image
- Check import records
- Narrow the list to a likely maker
Evidence before confidence.
A public listing, a badge, a licence line, a price gap or a map pin is a signal, not proof of who makes a product. The guides say which is which, and none of them claims that one check settles supplier identity on its own.
The only things that settle it are a person asking the seller directly in Chinese, obtaining the licence, requesting production evidence, or visiting. Do that before a deposit, not after.
Sourcia automates the search side of this.
Photograph a product, or upload an image in your browser, and Sourcia names the product, reads the public export catalogue on Made-in-China.com, returns the listings that fit your photo with the seller-published details kept separate from anything a person has checked, and lists the questions you still need to ask. It is a research starting point for the checks above, not a replacement for them.