Last updated: 28 July 2026. Fair schedules, hall allocations and exhibitor lists change from edition to edition — check the organiser’s own announcements for dates. This page describes our vetting work, not the fair.
A trade fair is a discovery channel, not a verification channel. Everything you can see at a booth is what the exhibitor chose to put there. The things that decide whether an order goes well — who the legal entity is, whether they own a line, whether the certificate is in scope — are all somewhere else, and most of them are checkable in the weeks after the fair, before any money moves.
The limits of a booth
What a booth doesn’t tell you.
None of the following is visible from the aisle, and none of it is answered by a good conversation with a friendly export manager:
- Whether they manufacture or resell. Both are legitimate businesses. Only one of them is what you were told you were dealing with.
- Whether the samples on the table were made by them. A display sample can come from anywhere, including from the factory they buy from.
- Whether the facility matches the scale implied. Booth size and photo boards are marketing budget, not floor space.
- Whether their business licence permits what they’re selling you. Registered business scope is a matter of public record and it does not always cover the product on the stand.
- Whether they’ve ever exported to your market — or hold the certifications your market requires, in the right scope, issued by a body that is actually accredited.
- Whether the person you met has any authority. The card says Sales Manager. It does not say whether they can commit the company to anything.
This is not an argument against trading companies. We are one, and we say so on every page of this site — our business scope is public on gsxt.gov.cn and we are seller of record on the shipments we trade. A reseller who tells you they are a reseller is a perfectly good partner. The failure is concealment: a company that misrepresents what it is has already shown you how it will handle the next inconvenient fact.
If you want the long version of that argument, it’s on why buy through a trading company.
What we check
Five things, all of them evidenced.
- Registry. The legal entity on gsxt.gov.cn — registered capital, business scope, standing, and whether the name on the card matches the entity that would actually invoice you. This is where most surprises surface, and it costs nothing but attention.
- Manufacturing. Whether a facility exists at the registered address, and whether it makes what they showed you. On site, photographed, by one of our people rather than a form emailed to the supplier.
- Capacity. Line count, staffing and realistic output, read against the volumes and lead times you were promised at the booth.
- Export history. Whether they have shipped to your market before, and whether there is documentation to support the claim rather than an assertion in a slide deck.
- Certification. Real, current, in scope for your product, and issued by an accredited body. All four have to hold. A valid certificate for a different product line is not a certificate for yours.
The deliverable
One page per supplier, and a plain verdict.
You get a one-page verdict for each company you send us: verified manufacturer, trading company, or unable to confirm — with the evidence and photographs behind it, so you can disagree with our reading if you want to.
- Turnaround Confirmed in writing when we quote, alongside the fee.
- Pricing Fixed fee per supplier, quoted in writing before we start. A single factory visit is a published US$268 you can book outright; a fair shortlist is a multi-supplier package — registry, export history and a site visit for each supplier — so it is quoted per request.
- Coverage Guangdong and the neighbouring manufacturing regions; further afield, we’ll say so before you commit.
- Next step If a supplier passes, the same evidence feeds straight into first-order inspection.
What this isn’t
It isn’t a guarantee. Verification is a snapshot of what we could establish, evidenced and dated. It tells you who you are dealing with; it does not promise how they will behave on order six. That is what inspection and managed procurement are for.
“Unable to confirm” is a real result. Sometimes an address leads nowhere, a supplier declines a visit, or the paperwork doesn’t reconcile. We report that as it stands rather than rounding it up into a pass. A refused site visit is information, and it goes in the report.
We’re not a certification body. We check that certificates are real, current, in scope and accredited. We do not issue them, and we don’t accept a scan as proof of anything on its own.
Timing
The window is the weeks after the fair.
The useful moment sits between coming home and paying a deposit. That is when the shortlist is fresh, nobody has committed anything, and a bad answer costs you an email rather than a container.
Before you travel is even better if you can manage it. Send us the exhibitor list for the categories you care about and we’ll screen the registry entries in advance, so the hours you spend in the halls go to companies already worth meeting.
After the deposit is still worth doing, but the leverage is gone. At that point verification is damage assessment rather than a decision, and if it turns up something serious you are already negotiating from behind. If that’s where you are, start with what to check before releasing final payment.
How to send them
What we need from you.
Photographs of the cards are fine — most people just send the pile. Where you have it, add the Chinese company name, the product they quoted you, and the volumes and lead times they promised, because capacity is only meaningful measured against a number they gave you.
Tell us which ones you actually intend to buy from. Paying to verify a supplier you were never going to use is waste, and we would rather do five properly than twenty superficially.