Most new sellers pick a supplier on price, then find out the goods came from a reseller with a copied product photo. Price is not the filter. Three checks do most of the work: verify the licence against the government registry, confirm the registered address is where the parcel actually ships from, and read the service record on the store page. None of them takes more than ten minutes.
1. Check the licence, not the shop
A business licence hanging on the store page is a photo, not a document. Three failure modes are routine: the image is too blurred to read the registration number, the licence has expired, or the registered business scope does not cover what the shop is selling. A licence reading "daily sundries" (日用百货) on a vape seller is the version everyone should expect to meet. The real check is one URL — the national enterprise credit information disclosure system at gsxt.gov.cn. Search the full registered company name and read three things. Enterprise status must read "active" (存续); walk away from anything cancelled or revoked. The business scope has to name the category you are about to buy. And the incorporation date has to be more than a year old, because platform data published on wiki.1688.com shows entities founded under 6 months ago run a dispute rate 2.3 times the average. Then reconcile the two records: the unified social credit code, the legal representative name and the registered address shown on the 1688 store page must match the registry entry exactly. One asymmetry matters more than all of that. If a seller can produce a brand authorisation letter but not their own business licence, stop there — authorisation is not a trading qualification, and something easy to obtain is not evidence of anything.
2. Registered address vs shipping origin: the cheapest test
The classic pattern is a company registered in Yiwu whose parcels ship from Guangzhou. Nothing about that is illegal, but it usually means one of two things: the seller is a trading company reselling someone else’s production, or your order is being forwarded to a drop-shipper and you are paying for the privilege. Three ways in. Ask for a handheld video of the storefront — the company signboard, the street number, ideally with the current date visible — then match that address against the registry record and look at it on a map to see whether it is an industrial park, an office building or a residential block. Or skip the argument and place a 30-50 RMB test order: the origin printed on the waybill has to be the address they claimed. Two warning signs are worth naming: an origin that changes between orders, and parcels that always emerge from a third-party smart warehouse, which is worth asking about out loud — do they have a warehouse at all. The data backs this up. In a sample of 230 leading suppliers published on peixun.1688.com, sellers whose registered address and shipping warehouse are the same location carry a dispute rate 67% below the industry average. That is not proof of honesty, but it separates two populations that look identical on a storefront.
3. Read the service record before you read the price
A clean licence and a matching address still leave one thing unverified: whether the seller can actually perform. Some shops have a complete shell — genuine licence, genuine address, genuine signage — and fall apart at the fulfilment stage. Inventory is updated by hand, so the size you ordered was sold twice; after-sales goes quiet for three days; payment is only accepted by WeChat transfer. Three things to look at. First, how the transaction is structured: look for the trust badges — "诚信通" or "实力商家" — and check that 1688 escrow is enabled, because a seller who insists on WeChat transfer or "pay first, ship later" has removed the only protection you had. Second, ask whether they integrate with an ERP and support ISV tools like "逸淘" or "妙手" for automated stock and order sync. "I update stock manually every day" is an overselling problem waiting to happen. Third, open the service record on the store and read the average return-handling time over the last 30 days. Above 48 hours without a response means the operation will not survive a peak-season flood of questions.
FAQ
If a shop displays a business licence, does that make it a factory?
No. A business licence only proves the entity is allowed to trade. Factories, trading companies and drop-shipping resellers all hold one, and a scope line reading "daily sundries" (日用百货) covers an enormous amount of what gets sold online. The signals that separate them sit elsewhere: whether the registered address matches the shipping origin, whether stock is integrated or typed in by hand, and whether the service record shows anyone actually answering. None of those appear on the licence.
Why are newly registered companies riskier?
Platform data on wiki.1688.com puts a number on it: entities founded less than 6 months ago run a dispute rate 2.3 times the average. A new entity has no trading history, no reviews that carry weight, and no working relationship with the platform, which means that when something goes wrong the platform has nothing to lean on either. Operating for more than a year is not a guarantee. It is simply the point at which a dispute rate stops being an outlier.
Can the 1688CMP extension tell me whether a supplier is genuine?
No, and it would not be honest of us to imply otherwise. The extension does one thing: on a 1688 product page it sorts 5 sourcing agents by total landed cost — item price, service fee and shipping. Supplier vetting is not part of it. Minimum order quantities, shipping origin, and whether a seller is a factory or a shell are facts held by 1688 itself, they change without notice, and they exist in no public dataset we are willing to guess at. Verify the supplier yourself with the three checks above, and use the extension for the part of the problem that is actually comparable.