Experts Insights: How to Verify Suppliers at the Early Stages of Trade?

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Did you ever have a hard time finding a trustworthy supplier? Do you know how to verify suppliers at the early stages of trade?

By participating in our forum activities, our members and experts have shared their great insights and experiences with the community.

Let’s see what they have to say on this topic:

l Reference

Tips

To check if the supplier is trustworthy or not you can ask for any references of his existing clients.

(From Forum Member: khashar)

l Do some research

Tips

To find a reliable supplier from a host of choices, it is important to know your requirements and communicate this to the suppliers in advance. 

Do some research first about the company profiles, investments, locations and product lines.

If you can see their product lines suggest a very chaotic succession from products to products without a core strong objective, this should be a red flag. There should be a professionalism and innovation on the side of the suppliers to give you more than you want.

l Factory Visit

Tips

The best option for you when you want to visit the factories is to have the company located within 50 km of each other, this way your travel expense will be much lesser at first. It is important to visit the factory of your suppliers to know first hand their abilities and their long term relations with you. 

(From Forum Member: GMPImportExport)

l Website

Tips

Look at their website, they have to have one if they are serious. Search for meaningful content about themselves and what they do. If they have a telephone, contact email, an "about us" page. Scammers rarely go to all this trouble and usually have one web page that is 3 million characters long.

(From Forum Member: secondreview)

l Inspection Agency

Tips

Inspection Agencies is the best way to go. Locate one. Pay your desired 2 - 3 percent and sleep easy.

l Find Trader

Tips

Go to Hong Kong. Find a good trader there. Pay your 2 - 5 percent and let them take up the headaches.
Hong Kong laws will prevent anyone to deceive or dupe importers. They can get their hides peeled off for that.

(From Forum Member: multibizhk)



1. Contact your supplier through correspondences or emails, or call them directly if you can speak Chinese. If not, it doesn’t matter; most of the suppliers have their staffs to deal with the language problem.

A reliable supplier would ask you more detail about product before offering the price including description, specification, packing condition, payment method, delivery time, etc. Because all these factors would affect the price, the price offering is the most serious process and also the final transaction process. Go through this procedure you can feel and touch the suppliers and know how good they are. If the seller promise whatever you want, or the price they offered is too low than average, this is most likely fraudsters. Just ignore and go to next.

2. Face to face meet with your suppliers and establish personal relationships with them.

After you find some of satisfied suppliers, invest a few thousands to make a trip to China, visit China Suppliers factories, face to face to discuss further detail about your products including price, payment term, quality inspection, delivery time etc.

(From Forum Member: kellyli)

 

l The trustworthy supplier on Alibaba is Gold member with trust pass verified member;

l For Non-member, you may have to get some information to verify it by asking the supplier:

1. To whom or which companies that they ever supplied, ask the reference letter from the supplier's customer, ask its contact person and address to get some info.

2. Cross checking, ask the permission from supplier that you will contact the companies that been given, to get their opinion and impression about the performance of this Supplier.

3. Re-Checking their address, phone number, website, license (if any) etc via Search Engine (Google, Yahoo, AOL, Who is, Ask, Answer, etc) then the Yellow page&white page for their phone number (fix station) not the cell or mobile phone. The Zip or code post for the address. etc.
    -  It also must do the same to the references source that been given for.
    -  It may happen that those several contacts are from the same group/team.

4. If you or any from your resource are good enough in IT (web mail).
    - You will and can check the web, domain, email, from the IP, hosting, server, etc; if it is unknown zone, unidentified, not trustworthy source or not authenticated etc, then be aware of it, chose and select the most save, clear and authenticated one.
    -  If you unable to do this verification, consult with some IT expert or Web master to checking the e-mail, domain, website and the company statistic&historical.
    -  You may try use Alexa and few SE. too.

5. After the above Preliminary or sorting the nomination of few contacts/suppliers, next step is to email them each, and asking them by several correspondences of :
    -  Their company profile, organization, experiences, comparative advantages.
    -  Their achieving, best products, high demand items etc. 
    -  How long been in export business in the items or similar with? etc.

Those are the very early stage points that you need to do to verify the supplier.

 
(From Forum Member: Oneuni)

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