Alibaba supplier verification: what Gold Supplier, Verified and "Manufacturer" really tell you
What each Alibaba badge checks, what it leaves open, and the four records that show whether a Chinese supplier makes your product or resells it.
You found a supplier on Alibaba.com with a good price, a Gold Supplier badge and "Manufacturer" next to its name. Before you send a deposit, it pays to know what each of those labels was checked against, and which question they leave open: does this company make your product, or buy it from someone who does?
What the Alibaba badges check
Gold Supplier is a paid annual membership. Alibaba confirms the company is legally registered before it can join. Factories buy the membership, and so do trading companies, sourcing agents and one-person resellers. The badge tells you the company exists and pays for premium placement.
Verified Supplier goes further: an independent inspection company visits the supplier and reports on its facilities, staff and capabilities, and the profile shows the result. It is the strongest signal on the platform. Read the report itself: it describes the site that was visited at the time of the visit, and it is the supplier who chooses which site that is.
Business type: "Manufacturer" / "Trading company" is filled in by the supplier on its own profile. Many trading companies list themselves as manufacturers because buyers search for them.
Trade Assurance protects the payment you make through Alibaba against late shipment and goods that do not match the contract. It is about the order, not about who makes the goods.
Four records that answer the factory question
Every company in mainland China leaves an official paper trail. These four records separate makers from resellers:
- Business scope (经营范围). Filed with the market regulator and printed on the licence. Factories register production items such as 生产, 制造 or 加工; trading companies register 销售, 批发 or 进出口. Paste a scope into our free business scope checker to see the split.
- Pollutant-discharge permit or registration. Factories that run production lines register with the national discharge-permit platform, with the site and its industry, for example "metal tool manufacturing". In our test set of confirmed factories, 63% had one.
- Insured staff. Annual reports list how many employees the company pays social insurance for. A factory with "200 workers" and 4 insured staff is worth a question.
- Who it buys from. A factory's VAT invoices show raw materials, moulds, packaging and an electricity bill. A trading company's show finished goods from other factories, often the factory you actually want.
Match the legal entity
Ask the supplier for its 18-character Unified Social Credit Code (USCC) and check it in our free USCC decoder. Then make sure the same name and code appear on the pro forma invoice, the contract and the bank account you pay. A code beginning with 92 belongs to an individual business, not a company.
Put it together in one report
A Factory or Trader report reads all of the above from the supplier's own registry, permit, court and VAT invoice records, and gives you one of four verdicts: factory, trader, combined factory and trader, or insufficient evidence. When the supplier is a trader, it ranks the factories it most likely buys your product from, and it ends with what to do for orders under $50K, from $50K to $500K, and over $500K.
Check a supplier or read the sample report.