DEV Community: Sol Research Desk

How to Verify a Chinese Supplier: The 6-Step System (Before the Wire)

Sol Research Desk — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:59:42 +0000

The wire goes out on Tuesday. The container arrives in April. Inside: 3,000 units that fail your marketplace's safety review, a spec sheet nobody signed, and a supplier who has stopped replying to emails in any language.

This pattern shows up in import communities every single week. And in almost every retelling, the money was lost before the wire was sent — at the verification step that got skipped.

I'm a sourcing researcher. After years of collecting these failure patterns (and the professional workflows that prevent them), I open-sourced the prevention system on GitHub: awesome-china-sourcing — free, no signup. This article is the condensed version: the six-step verification system, the five fastest red flags, and the exact documents that hold up when things go wrong.

The core idea: verify the company, not the conversation

Most first-time importers verify a feeling: the salesperson was responsive, the photos looked professional, the Alibaba page had badges. Professionals verify facts: the legal entity, the physical factory, the export history.

Here's the six-step system (we call it VERIFY — yes, it's a backronym; the steps are what matter):

1. Validate the license

Every legitimate Chinese exporter has a business license (营业执照) with a Unified Social Credit Code. Two checks matter:

Cross-check the license name against the Alibaba/1688 company name. A mismatch means you're talking to a middleman presenting as the factory. That's not automatically fatal — trading companies can be excellent partners — but paying factory prices to a trader is how margins die quietly.
Pull the license details (scope of business, capital, legal representative) from the public National Enterprise Credit Information system. If the "manufacturer" can't produce a license, the conversation is over.

Time cost: ~15 minutes.

2. Establish the factory

Ask for a live video walk of the production floor — during their working hours, on a scheduled call, with the specific machines your product requires.

A real manufacturer can do this trivially. A trading company renting a narrative will have a reason it "coincidentally" can't: the floor is busy, the camera is broken, COVID policies, time zones, a typhoon. One miss is a coincidence. Two is a pattern.

3. Reference check — and actually contact them

Ask for 2–3 export customers in your market. Then contact them through channels the supplier doesn't control (find the company on LinkedIn, email the domain, not the Gmail the supplier "helpfully" provided).

Silence from references is a red flag the size of a container. Real export customers of real factories respond — usually with useful detail.

4. Inspect the sample — from a different channel

Order a sample through the supplier's retail front on Taobao or 1688 (most real manufacturers have one), or through a third party. Why? Because a supplier can stage gold-plated sample units for the "important prospective buyer." They can't stage the units they don't know are being inspected.

5. Fix it in writing

The spec sheet with tolerances, materials, test standards, and packaging — signed, with the Proforma Invoice referencing it. "Same as the sample" is not a specification. "Same as before" is not a specification. When the dispute comes (and in sourcing, disputes are a when-question for someone), the signed spec sheet is the only document that matters.

6. Year-check the record

Suppliers have histories. Customs shipment data shows what they actually export and in what volumes. Court records and complaint platforms show how they behave when things go wrong. Thirty minutes of digging here filters out the serial offenders.

The 5 fastest red flags

The full toolkit lists ten. These five disqualify fastest:

License name ≠ platform name and nobody can explain why.
Payment to a personal account or a third company's account. Walk away. Legitimate exporters take payment to their corporate account, full stop.
Prices dramatically below every comparable quote. You found their margin strategy: it's you.
No video access to the floor, ever, for any reason.
References that can only be reached through the supplier.

What's in the free toolkit

Everything above is systematized in the awesome-china-sourcing repo, including:

The full VERIFY system with per-step scripts (what to ask, in what order, and what answers mean)
Quality inspection checklists (pre-production, during-production, pre-shipment)
An Incoterms cheat sheet — who owns the cargo, when, under FOB/EXW/CIF/DDP
A landed-cost calculator template
Negotiation email templates — RFQ, price negotiation, sample requests, dispute escalation

Copy them, fork them, ship safer.

The uncomfortable summary

Supplier verification isn't a talent or a gift. It's a checklist executed without exception — including the exceptions you want to make when the price is perfect and the salesperson is warm and the timeline is tight. The importers who don't get burned aren't luckier. They're systematic.

The system is free. Use it before the next wire.

Sol Research Desk publishes open-source sourcing intelligence — verification systems, negotiation templates, and cost tools for e-commerce founders. The complete 25-template China Sourcing Playbook is available at the product page.

The GitHub-Only Monetization Stack: Free Repo to Paid Product

Sol Research Desk — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:12:08 +0000

The GitHub-Only Monetization Stack: From Free Repo to Paid Product (Zero Platforms, Zero Website Costs)

I just spent 48 hours building a complete digital-product business on GitHub alone — no Gumroad, no website hosting bills, no third-party payment platform. Everything runs on GitHub's free tier plus one payment rail. Here's the full technical stack, component by component, so you can clone the architecture for your own product.

Why GitHub-only?

Most "sell your digital product" guides funnel you into platform roulette: Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, Payhip, Ko-fi... Each one takes a cut, each one can deplatform you, and for many sellers outside the US/EU, each one has a different payout horror story. GitHub offers a genuinely complete alternative stack if you're selling knowledge products: docs, templates, checklists, code, prompts.

The stack, top to bottom

The profile repo (your landing zone)

GitHub renders yourname/yourname README on your profile page. Mine (github.com/assassinationss) is a one-screen pitch: what I publish, what's free, where to start. Treat it like a landing page — because that's how strangers experience you when they click your avatar from any repo, commit, or issue.

The SEO repo (your Google bait)

GitHub domain authority is absurd. A well-structured README in a public repo outranks most independent blogs for long-tail queries within weeks. My playbook: one repo per knowledge domain, README structured with jump-link headers (a mini table of contents), plus docs/ deep-dive articles targeting decision-stage search terms ("X vs Y", "how to verify Z in 2026").

Topics matter: repo topics are indexed and surface in GitHub's internal topic pages, which carry real search traffic. Set all twelve.

The landing page (GitHub Pages, free forever)

The product landing page lives in its own repo with GitHub Pages enabled — custom-domain-ready, CDN-backed, zero maintenance. Commit → push → live. The buy buttons point to the payment rail (next) and an email fallback for direct sales.

The product vault (private repo as deliverable)

Here's the trick nobody talks about: a private repo is a perfectly good product container. PDFs, templates, prompt libraries — versioned, organized, always accessible. Grant access per-customer via GitHub collaborator seats, or (better) gate a sponsor-only repo behind a sponsorship tier, which automates access on payment and revokes it on cancellation. Zero delivery infrastructure to build.

The payment rail (GitHub Sponsors)

GitHub Sponsors now supports one-time and recurring payments with bank payout to many countries. Set your tier's "reward" to include access to the vault repo, and you have a fully automated sell-access-revoke loop entirely inside GitHub.

The growth loop

Each component feeds the next: profile repo funnels avatar clicks → SEO repo catches Google searchers → landing page converts → Sponsors tier delivers → the free content in the vault's public sibling repo generates the next round of search traffic. It's a flywheel with one moving part: keep publishing genuinely useful free material, and the paid tier sells itself to the people who want it packaged, organized, and complete.

What I'd do differently

Ship the free material before the paid product. I launched both together; the free repo is what actually generates inbound. Second: submit your Pages site to search engines proactively — a sitemap plus an IndexNow key file (a static TXT with a UUID, pinged to api.indexnow.org) gets Bing/Yandex crawling within the day.

The whole stack costs $0/month at any scale you're likely to hit in year one, and every piece of it is exportable if you outgrow it.

Full working example: my free China sourcing verification toolkit (github.com/assassinationss/awesome-china-sourcing) — open-source templates, checklists, and two 2026-updated deep guides — with the complete paid playbook behind it. Clone the architecture, not just the idea.