Are you worrying about whether the new supplier you are going to cooperate with is a cheater? Everything might seem to be going on quite well and smoothly from the order confirmation to the shipment. But after you settle the balance payment, the supplier disappears but then you get nothing from them.
A lot of oversea buyers have undergone such experience and suffered a big loss. Is it difficult to distinguish a fake supplier? Below are some tips for your reference,
- It is preferred to source the supplier form some well-organized exhibitions. If the supplier attend the fairs regularly every year. It means lower risk that it is a fake company. Most of the frauds happen in the cases that the suppliers are sourced from the B2B website and the suppliers don’t attend the fair. If you find the supplier from the B2B website, you could also inquire the fair list that they would participate in regularly.
- Search the supplier’s company name in the website to see if there is any complaint record about this company. Some buyers that have been cheated previously posted the cheater’s company name on the website and this could help you avoid the same bad experience.
- Visit the factory personally. The presentation of the sales representative at the booth does not prove the creditability of the supplier. Visiting the factory could help you verify the whether the supplier is a real manufacturer or a trading company with a small office with two people. Obviously, if it’s the latter case, it is easier for the supplier to take the money and do not show up again.
- It may cost you much to travel all the potential suppliers by yourself, so you could consider hiring the professional third party inspection company for this audit. The advantage of hiring the third party audit company is that they could collect more thorough information and understand all the documents in Chinese. After getting the audit report, you will also know more about the supplier’s credibility.
For some fake company, they will have strange behaviors when knowing there will be an audit. For example, they become difficult to be contacted with for the audit; the fake company will give very little information when the third party audit company request them to fill out a complete investigation form as a general audit procedure; they could not provide an specific address for the audit, and just a general one, to which the auditor could not go by himself; meanwhile, the contact person on the audit date did not show up at the station until late in the afternoon, leaving very little time for a detailed audit work.
Then, after confirming that the potential supplier is credible, you could start to place some small trial orders before placing any big project.
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