Finding a supplier on Alibaba is the easy part. A few searches, a handful of inquiries, and within a day you have quotes from sellers offering attractive prices and fast lead times. The hard part is answering a question the platform cannot answer for you: is there a real factory behind this storefront, a small trading intermediary, or a fraudster with no assets at all?
Badges like Trade Assurance, "Verified Supplier," or eight years of membership are not the answer. They are platform-internal signals, and they say little about the company's actual standing in the Chinese corporate registry. The encouraging news is that China runs a surprisingly open company registration system. Registered capital, litigation history, ownership structure, and registration status are largely public. What follows are seven checks to run — in order — before you send your first payment. Most take minutes, not days.
None of them requires a lawyer. They require a USCC, a browser, and the willingness to walk away.
The first two checks confirm that your counterparty is a real, active legal entity. Until they pass, the rest of the list is meaningless.
1. Get the company's legal name and USCC. Every Chinese legal entity has an 18-digit Unified Social Credit Code (统一社会信用代码), roughly the equivalent of a tax ID and company registration number combined. On Alibaba, you can often find it without even asking: on the product page, click the small downward arrow next to the seller's company name — it is an easy icon to miss — and an info card expands. Look for the line labeled "Registration No." That 18-digit code is the USCC. Alibaba does not call it "USCC" anywhere, so searching the page for that term gets you nowhere. Note that on some storefronts the card only appears in the desktop view and may be missing on mobile.
If the code is not visible, ask the supplier for a copy of their business license (营业执照). For a legitimate company this is routine — Chinese businesses print their USCC on invoices. A contact who stalls on this request for weeks has already given you a check result, and it is not a good one.
2. Verify the registration status. With the USCC in hand, your first stop is China's official registry platform, the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (gsxt.gov.cn). The record returns the company's legal name, incorporation date, registered capital, legal representative, and — the most critical field — registration status. 存续 means active and operating. 注销 means deregistered; 吊销 means the license has been revoked. A company in either of the latter states cannot legally trade, and a deposit wired to such a company's bank account becomes a debt you will struggle to recover through any channel.
Registry data is also good at catching narrative inconsistencies. For example, a kitchenware importer looks up a seller that presents itself as a Guangdong-based factory. The USCC query shows the company was actually incorporated four years ago in an inland province, with just two shareholders. That alone proves nothing — the sales entity and the manufacturing entity can legitimately be different companies — but the gap between "our factory in Foshan" and the registry record is something the supplier should be able to explain. If they cannot, you have your answer.
The company exists and is active. Now look at its track record.
3. Scan litigation and enforcement records. Databases that aggregate Chinese registry data, such as Tianyancha, show lawsuits the company is party to, court enforcement cases, and whether its legal representative appears on the national list of judgment defaulters (失信被执行人). The pattern matters more than the count. Any trading company picks up the occasional dispute; what should worry you is a recent cluster of cases where the company is consistently the defendant in supplier or buyer disputes — that is what "takes payment, never delivers" looks like when it surfaces in official records.
For example, a seller with three enforcement cases in the past eighteen months, all small unpaid-supplier claims, is telling you something specific: this company runs on other people's money and is short of it.
4. Cross-check the story against incorporation date, capital, and ownership. Registry data is most useful as a lie detector. A supplier claiming to be a "20-year-old factory" whose registration shows incorporation three years ago is either exaggerating or is not the owner of that factory at all. Registered capital is a scale signal too: a company claiming millions of dollars in production capacity with minimal registered capital has a question to answer. Ownership structure tells you who actually stands behind the entity — and if the same shareholders sit atop other companies that were shut down or sanctioned, those links are traceable in the records.
If navigating Chinese-language sources is not practical, you can, for example, run a search by company name or USCC on China Trade Intel and get this data back as an English due-diligence report covering risk score, ownership, litigation and enforcement history, and contact verification in one document. Whichever route you take, treat a clean search as a starting point, not a guarantee: registries update with delays, so if something feels off, seek confirmation rather than reassurance.
The last three checks focus on the stage where scams are most often caught: the payment itself.
5. Look for consistency in contact details. A company claiming to be an established manufacturer whose only channels are WhatsApp and a Gmail address is waving a flag. A corporate email domain, a landline at the registered address, a website address that matches the registry address — none of these proves anything alone, but together they paint a consistent picture. One simple test: call the phone number in the registry record, introduce yourself, and reference your ongoing discussion. Whether the person on the other end knows who you are tells you a lot. Answers like "that's our sales team's number, we're the production side" are sometimes legitimate and sometimes not; clarifying the relationship between the registered entity and the person you are dealing with is your job.
6. Confirm the bank account name matches the company name. This may be the single most important item on the list. The beneficiary name on the proforma invoice must exactly match the company's legal name in the registry. An account in an individual's name, an account opened in a third country, or explanations like "this is our accounting firm's account" are classic fraud patterns. If the account name and company name do not match, do not pay — legitimate exceptions to this rule are rare enough to treat as nonexistent.
Consider a textile importer who notices that the proforma from an otherwise approved supplier names a different company as beneficiary. Asked about it, the supplier says "our export license runs through that company." This arrangement genuinely exists in China — but it is only acceptable if the relationship between the two companies can be verified in the registry. Otherwise your deposit is going to a legal entity you have never heard of.
7. Structure the payment to match your risk. Even after verification comes back clean, wiring 100% upfront on a first order is unnecessary exposure. Staged payments (deposit plus balance before shipment), independent pre-shipment inspection, and letters of credit for larger amounts are standard protection for early transactions with any new supplier, no matter how clean they look. When you do the cost math on a new supplier relationship, build these control costs into the order price. Judge the deal by your total risk, not by the sample price.
Verification lowers risk; it never removes it. The payment structure is what protects you when a check you could not run turns out to matter.
Is Trade Assurance enough protection against scams?
Trade Assurance runs a refund mechanism through the platform when an order is not delivered under the agreed terms, and you should absolutely use it. But its scope is limited to what is written in the order contract; it tells you nothing about the company's real status, history, or ownership. Platform protection and registry verification are complements, not alternatives.
What if the supplier refuses to send their business license?
A business license is a public document in China; sharing it reveals no trade secret. Rather than arguing, you can search for the company yourself by its full Chinese name on gsxt.gov.cn or Tianyancha. If you cannot even pin down the exact legal name, do not move to the payment stage with a counterparty you cannot verify.
Do these checks still apply to "Verified Supplier" storefronts?
Yes. Platform verifications typically rely on document and site checks performed at a point in time, and their scope is limited. A badge is a useful first filter, but it does not monitor litigation history, ownership structure, or current registration status on your behalf. For high-value orders, doing your own verification is always your responsibility.