How do I vet an Alibaba supplier before I order?

Almost everything a buyer needs at this stage is public, free, and takes under an hour — but it is in Chinese, on a government site, and organised around a number most buyers have never been given. The sequence below is the order the checks actually matter in, which is not the order most checklists put them in.

Step one: get the entity, not the storefront

A marketplace storefront is an account. The counterparty you will pay and, if it comes to it, pursue, is a registered company. Ask for two things in writing: the full company name in Chinese characters, and the Unified Social Credit Code — the eighteen-character alphanumeric identifier on the business licence. A supplier who will not give you these has told you something useful.

Step two: read the registry record

The Unified Social Credit Code resolves to one entity on the national registry. What the record gives you, free:

• Whether the company exists, and whether its status is still active.
• Its registration date — which is not the same as the "established in 2009" on the storefront.
• Registered and paid-in capital, published separately.
• The registered scope of business, which states in plain terms whether this entity is licensed to manufacture, to wholesale, or to trade.
• The legal representative, and whether the company carries filed abnormalities.

Step three: the three names that must agree

Where the name appears	What it should be
Business licence / registry record	The registered entity, in Chinese
Proforma invoice and contract	The same registered entity
Bank account holder	The same registered entity again

A mismatch here is the highest-value signal available to a buyer, and it is the one that separates a supplier problem from a payment-diversion fraud. Payment instructions that name a Hong Kong company, an individual, or an entity you have not seen before are a stop-work condition, not an administrative quirk to be resolved after the transfer.

What the badges do and do not tell you

Marketplace tiers are worth understanding precisely rather than dismissing. Some are paid memberships. Some involve a third-party inspection of specified facts on a specified date. Some are transaction protections that apply only to orders placed and paid through the platform. None of them is a statement that the company can make your product to your specification, and none of them survives a payment made outside the platform.

What this does not cover

Everything above establishes that a real, appropriately licensed company is on the other end. It does not establish capability: whether the factory can hold your tolerance, whether the certificate they sent is genuine and covers your model, or whether the line you were shown on a video call is theirs. Those are separate questions, they require someone on the ground or a document trail, and they are worth answering before a first order of any size.