There is nothing illegal about being a trading company. A good export agent can hold inventory, consolidate orders, handle the paperwork and save you a factory visit. The problem starts when a trading company presents itself as the factory, because every decision you make after that is based on a false picture. You think you are choosing a plant with the presses that will run your part. You are choosing a middle layer that will re-quote your drawing to someone you never meet. Tooling ownership, DFM feedback, material traceability, capacity promises and liability all sit with a party you have not audited, and in most cases cannot even identify. The good news is that on a factory website the gap between manufacturer and reseller is usually visible in public, free-to-check data. Below are the twelve checks we run, and what a real factory shows against each one. Every example is anonymised, and you can run all twelve on us.
How do you check if a Chinese supplier is a real factory?
Check the company's registration record rather than its website. Every company registered in China carries a national industry classification, a licensed business scope, a registered capital figure, an insured headcount and a registered address, and all five are public. A manufacturer is classified under manufacturing, and its scope contains production, manufacture or processing. A trading company is classified under wholesale and retail, software and information technology services, or business services, and its scope lists sales, wholesale, import and export, advertising or technical services instead. Then read the address literally: industrial premises name a road, a number and a district, while trading addresses describe a unit inside a building - Room, Unit, Suite, Flat, apartment, residential compound. Finally, compare the claimed founding year against the domain registration date, and the claimed headcount against the insured headcount. If three or more of these disagree with the website, treat the factory claim as unverified.
Why this costs more than it looks
Price: a reseller adds a margin that is invisible in the quote, and you pay it on every order including the tooling. Tooling: if your die is built by an unnamed third party, you do not control the tool, the drawing revisions, the maintenance record or the spare inserts, and when the relationship ends so does your access. Engineering: DFM feedback is the most valuable thing a stamper gives you, and a reseller cannot change a draw ratio, a radius or a wall thickness - it can only forward your drawing and forward the answer back. Traceability: when a batch fails you need heat numbers, coil certificates, press settings and inspection records, and a reseller has to ask someone else for all of it.
1. The address: is it a plant, or a room?
Read the address literally, word by word. Industrial premises describe themselves: a street, a number and a district. Trading-company addresses tend to describe a unit inside a larger commercial or residential building. The words to look for are Room, Rm, Unit, Suite, Flat, Floor, apartment, residential compound, community, and the village production-team industrial areas that appear in Chinese addresses.
- A four-digit room number inside a mixed-use apartment-and-office complex.
- A ground-floor unit number on an otherwise ordinary street address.
- A small unit on the tenth floor of an industrial-office building in Hong Kong.
- A mailbox-style Suite 110-I48 number in a US office building.
A five-digit room number is an office, not a factory floor. Also check whether the address on the contact page matches the address on the invoice, the company profile and the registration record. We have seen a supplier list one town on its contact page and a different town in its own company profile, with no plant address for either.
2. The registered industry classification
China classifies every registered company under a national industry code. A factory is registered under manufacturing - for example metal products or general equipment. A trading company is registered under wholesale and retail. A marketing-led export shop is often registered under software and information technology services, or under business services. This field is public, and it is the single fastest filter that exists. One deep drawing manufacturer we checked is registered as application software development, with a former name of investment consulting.
3. The licensed business scope
The business scope lists what the company is legally allowed to do. A real factory's scope contains production, manufacture and processing. One site we checked lists, in full: technical services, technical development, technical consulting, technology transfer, marketing planning, advertising design and placement, conference and exhibition services, hardware wholesale, hardware research, network technology services, internet data services, technology import and export, jewellery retail. There is no production, manufacturing or processing item anywhere in it, on a website that sells in-house tooling and press workshops.
4. Registered capital and insured headcount
Two numbers that are hard to fake. Registered capital: a plant running hundreds of tonnes of press capacity, a tool room and a CMM is not built on a few hundred thousand RMB. Insured headcount from the annual filing: a factory with one insured employee does not have eighty skilled workers, whatever the website says. Cross-check both against the claim. Hundreds of dies built in house and a five-hundred-tonne press line, sitting on a company with RMB 200,000 of capital and one insured employee, is not a capacity gap - it is a different business model.
5. Founding date versus domain age
Run two free lookups: the domain registration date, and the earliest snapshot of the site in the Wayback Machine. Then compare both with the founding year in the page header. Mismatches are common and revealing - a domain registered in 2026 with a page that says the company has supplied parts since 2009, a domain registered in 2019 with a page that claims fifteen years of engineering, a domain registered in 2021 with a page claiming to have supplied Fortune 500 companies since 2000.
6. Product range: narrow and deep, or wide and shallow?
A real stamping and deep drawing plant has a narrow catalogue and a deep one. It shows material grades, thickness ranges, draw ratios, tonnage, tolerances, tooling stages, secondary operations and inspection equipment, and it declines work outside its process. A reseller's catalogue is wide and shallow. One precision stamping manufacturer we looked at also sells CPU coolers, aluminium heat sinks for lithium battery boards, nickel-plated copper busbars, extruded aluminium profiles, battery spring contacts, laser cutting, welding and general CNC machining. No single plant runs extrusion, stamping, die casting and CNC turning at once. That is a sourcing desk with a catalogue.
7. Tooling: who owns and maintains the die?
Ask three questions and listen for specifics. How many toolmakers are on staff, and how many die sets did you build last year? Who owns the die, and what happens to it if we move the part? What is the maintenance interval, and how is it recorded? A real tool room answers with numbers, names and records. A reseller answers with the phrase in-house tooling and changes the subject. For reference, the industry convention for tooling warranty is for the life of the part number, with maintenance intervals set by volume and tool condition rather than by a calendar. See how we describe in-house tooling design and build.
8. Certificates: number, scope, issuing body
A certificate badge is decoration. A certificate is a document with a number, an issuing body, a scope and an expiry date. Ask for the certificate number, the certified scope - does it cover the manufacture of metal stampings at your specific site - the issuing body and the expiry date, then verify it. A page showing five certification badges with no numbers anywhere on the site is telling you how the page was written, not what the plant holds.
9. Is there a Chinese-language side at all?
This one surprises Western buyers, so it is worth stating plainly. A genuine Chinese manufacturer usually has some Chinese-facing presence: a Chinese site, a WeChat account, an ICP filing, recruitment posts, a Chinese company profile. When an operation that describes itself as a Chinese factory has only an English site, sometimes with a German translation bolted on, the site is a shopfront aimed at overseas buyers rather than a window into a plant. That does not automatically make it dishonest, but it means the factory content is marketing output, and it should be verified against the checks above.
10. What the page source says
Open the page source and search for Chinese characters, comments and platform names. Production sites leak. Real patterns we have collected while checking suppliers:
- A Chinese CSS comment left by the developer, dated the current month, describing a colour change requested by the client - on a page claiming fifteen years of manufacturing experience.
- A Shopify theme name that is a Chinese working draft title, dated in March.
- CSS comments that read like instructions from a client brief: replace with the brand primary colour, align with the black heading in the screenshot.
- An HTML comment noting a button added at the bottom of the page.
- Free email domains for a manufacturer: Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail.
- Chinese foreign-trade website-builder CDNs and lead-generation scripts in the asset paths.
None of these is proof on its own. Together they tell you who built the site, when, and for whom.
11. Physical evidence that is actually physical
- Satellite and street view. Put the address on a map. A plant has a yard, a loading bay, a roof footprint and neighbouring factories. An office room in a mixed-use tower has a lobby.
- Video. A fifty-second factory tour that never shows a machine nameplate, a coil, a die being assembled, or the same building twice is a stock edit.
- Equipment that reconciles. Press tonnage, bed size, coil width, feed length and annual capacity should be internally consistent. One page saying five to five hundred tonnes, another saying five to two hundred and fifty tonnes mechanical plus two hundred and fifty to five hundred tonnes hydraulic, and a third saying shipping from one floor, is a description written by someone who has not stood on the floor.
12. Cross-channel consistency
Pick five facts - legal name, address, founding year, number of employees, certification number - and check them in five places: the website, the company LinkedIn page, the registration record, the quotation header and the invoice. A real factory gives the same answers. A shopfront improvises, and the numbers drift: two different machine counts in two paragraphs on the same page, three addresses in three countries, a founding year that changes with the page.
The twenty-minute workflow
| Step | Where to look | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Domain age and first archive snapshot | A WHOIS or RDAP lookup, and the Wayback Machine | 3 min |
| The Chinese legal entity name | The site imprint page, footer, or structured data in the page source | 3 min |
| Registration record: industry code, business scope, capital, insured headcount, registered address | Public company-registry aggregators | 5 min |
| Read the address literally, then look at the premises on a map | Maps, satellite view | 3 min |
| Page source: Chinese comments, theme names, builder CDNs, free email domains | View source in the browser | 3 min |
| Language matrix and cross-channel consistency | Language switcher, hreflang, LinkedIn | 3 min |
If a supplier fails three or more of these, treat the factory claim as unverified and ask for the documents: the registration record, a certificate with a number and a scope, the tool room headcount, and a live video call with the press running. For the document pack and the live walkthrough, see how to audit a stamping supplier without visiting, and for the wider selection process see how to evaluate a metal stamping supplier in China.
Our own scorecard
We are asking you to run these checks, so here is Balford against them. Every line can be verified.
| Check | Balford |
|---|---|
| Legal entity | Zhejiang Balford Mechatronics Co., Ltd. (浙江百富都机电有限公司), stated in English and Chinese in our site markup |
| Factory address | 2# Guangfa Road, Yaojiang, Zhuji, Shaoxing, Zhejiang 311800, China |
| Premises and equipment | 12,000 m² production facility; presses 25-350 t; deep drawing to Ø250 mm; 500+ machines; 120+ employees |
| Quality system | ISO 9001:2015, certificate 20225Q20703R0S |
| Tooling | In-house tool room; DFM review before tooling on every enquiry |
| Chinese-language presence | Our group's Chinese-language site is cnhejun.com (Zhejiang Hejun Machinery Technology Co., Ltd., Zhuji, founded 2002), cross-linked with balford.net |
| Languages | 15 language versions on balford.net, including Chinese |
| Domain | balford.net, registered December 2018 |
| Product range | Deliberately narrow: deep drawn metal housings - solenoid valve housings, sensor housings, motor housings, shells, tubes and caps |
See the factory and equipment, the quality and certification page, and the equipment list. If you already hold a quote from someone else, send it with the drawing and we will tell you which process route the price implies, and where a trading margin usually hides.
Red flags at a glance
| Red flag | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Room, Unit, Suite or Flat as the only address | No production site disclosed |
| Registered industry is wholesale, retail, software or business services | The legal entity is not a manufacturer |
| Business scope with no production, manufacture or processing item | It cannot invoice manufacturing work as its own output |
| Registered capital in the low hundreds of thousands of RMB | Not the balance sheet behind a press line |
| One or two insured employees | The eighty skilled workers are on someone else's payroll |
| Domain younger than the claimed founding year | The history is copywriting |
| Eight unrelated product families on one site | A sourcing desk, not a plant |
| Certificate badges with no numbers or scope | Decoration |
| English-only site for a Chinese factory | A shopfront, not a window into a plant |
| Chinese developer comments and draft theme names in the page source | Recently built by an agency for export marketing |
| Machine counts that contradict each other on the same page | Nobody writing the page has seen the floor |
Key point
Verify the entity, not the website: registration record, address type, domain age, insured headcount and page source. Three disagreements with the website is enough to treat the factory claim as unverified. Then ask for the certificate number and scope, the tool room headcount, and a live video call with the press running.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find a Chinese supplier's registration record?
Start from the Chinese legal entity name, which most export sites publish in a footer, an imprint page or the structured data in the page source. Search that name, or the unified social credit code if the site gives one, on a public Chinese company-registry aggregator. The fields that matter are the national industry classification, the licensed business scope, the registered capital, the insured headcount from the latest annual filing, and the registered address.
Is it illegal or wrong for a trading company to sell to me?
No. Trading companies and export agents are legal, and a good one adds real value in consolidation, documentation and logistics. The problem is a trading company presenting itself as the factory, because you then make tooling, DFM, traceability and liability decisions on a false picture of who is doing the work.
What is the fastest single check?
The registered industry classification. It is one field, it is public, and it separates a manufacturing entity from a wholesale, software or business-services entity in a single lookup. It is not conclusive on its own - a group can hold several entities - so pair it with the address and the insured headcount.
The supplier says it has eighty workers. How do I verify that?
Ask for the insured headcount on the latest annual filing and compare it with the claim, then ask for the tool room headcount specifically and the number of die sets built in the last year. Insured headcount is the number the company itself files; a claim that is an order of magnitude larger than the filing is a claim about a different company.