Vetting has an order, and the order is most of the value. There is no point commissioning an audit of a factory that cannot make your product, and no point evaluating capability at a company that does not legally exist. Run the checks that can disqualify a candidate cheaply before the ones that cost money and weeks.
So this is a sequence, not a scorecard, and it applies wherever you found the supplier. Checks specific to a marketplace listing live in how to avoid Alibaba scams instead of here.
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Confirm the legal entity
Get the business licence or registration extract and read the registered name, address, business scope and registration number. Your contract and your bank beneficiary both attach to this entity.
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Check the trading name is the registered name
The European Commission’s China IP SME Helpdesk names an inconsistency between the trading name and the name on the licence as a flag requiring clarification. Five minutes, and it removes a whole class of problem.
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Match the process to the product
Decide what manufacturing process your product needs, then ask whether this plant runs it in-house. The most efficient disqualifier, and the one most often skipped.
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Check category experience, not general competence
Ask which products in your specific category this plant has produced, at what specification, for how long. A strong record in a neighbouring category is a different risk.
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Test capacity against your volumes and dates
Capability answers whether they can make one. Capacity answers whether they can make yours, in your window, alongside what is already booked on those machines.
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Verify certificates and audits at source
Check the holder, the validity period and the scope with the issuing body. Ask who performed each audit, against which standard, on what date, and what was found.
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Sample against a written specification
Approve a physical sample against measurable criteria, then retain it as the reference the production run is judged against.
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Set up monitoring before the first order
Vetting is a gate; performance is a series. Decide now what you measure per order and what a decline in it triggers.
Legal identity, and the address that is not the factory
Two addresses can differ legitimately: the registered address is often a head office while production sits elsewhere. What matters is knowing which is which, and that the plant you assessed is the plant that will run your order. Ask for the production address explicitly, and ask whether any part of the process is subcontracted.
Take that answer seriously. The Commission’s South-East Asia IP SME Helpdesk is direct: a supplier should not subcontract production of components to other companies, because when it does you lose control of the product and the know-how in it. The same guidance advises confirming a factory is a properly registered, legitimate business before anything else.
For an EU-registered counterparty — an agent, an importer of record, a European sales entity — the European e-Justice Portal’s Find a company service reaches member state business registers through the Business Registers Interconnection System, in real time and free of charge.
Capability means capability for your product
A general claim of competence is not assessable; a specific one is. Ask for the machine list for your process, with make, count and age. Ask which operations happen on the premises and which are bought in. Ask the tightest tolerance the plant routinely holds on the operation your product depends on.
The useful follow-up is not "can you make this" but "what is the hardest part of this for you". A supplier who names a genuine difficulty has read the specification. A supplier for whom nothing is difficult has not.
Capacity, MOQ and lead time
Capacity has to be asked against a calendar. Total monthly output tells you little if the relevant machines are committed in your window. Ask what share is already booked for your months, what happens to your order if a larger customer reschedules, and where you sit in that queue.
Minimum order quantities are usually a real constraint, not a negotiating position. They come from setup costs that do not scale down — a dye lot, a mould change, a machine changeover, a minimum roll upstream. Knowing which one drives the number tells you whether it can move. Ask for lead time split into material and production; the split is where slippage hides.
Certificates: scope and validity, not existence
A certificate is a statement by a named issuer, about a named holder, covering a named scope, for a stated period. A PDF forwarded by a supplier evidences none of those four. The mechanics are similar across schemes, and the issuing bodies publish them.
- Holder. Does it name this legal entity, at this site — not a group company, a sister plant or a material supplier upstream?
- Validity. Is it inside its period? OEKO-TEX issues a STANDARD 100 certificate for one year, and publishes a Label Check where a certificate number or the label’s QR code can be verified.
- Scope, at site and at shipment. GOTS states that not all products made or sold by a certified entity are necessarily certified, and distinguishes a Scope Certificate — supplier, scope, validity — from a Transaction Certificate covering a specific shipment. Only the second speaks to your goods.
- Authenticity, and subcontractors. GOTS advises that its public database is not definitive verification and that a certificate should be reconfirmed with the issuing certifier by company name and number. It also notes that subcontracted facilities are not shown there.
Which certificates you should be asking for is a separate question, and it turns on your product category and market. Some are legal obligations and some are voluntary schemes; confusing the two is the most common error in this area — see manufacturing compliance for EU brands.
Audits, and reading one properly
Audit evidence is only as informative as your knowledge of what the audit measured. Take amfori BSCI. amfori states that a BSCI audit consists of eighty-one questions, assessed through on-site observation, interviews and document review, producing a report graded from A to E, on a two-year cycle — with a follow-up audit required between two and twelve months later where the grade is below B. Knowing that, "BSCI audited" becomes three real questions: what grade, on what date, and where in the cycle the site is now.
Communication is a hard signal, not a soft one
How a supplier answers questions during vetting is the best available predictor of how they behave when something goes wrong in production. Latency matters less than content: does the reply address the question asked, does it separate what they know from what they assume, and do they push back where your specification is wrong?
A supplier who answers a technical question with reassurance is not a communication problem. They are telling you they will report a delay after it has happened.
Commercial and financial signals
- Payment terms demanded up front. A large deposit is not automatically a flag, but it is a position to understand rather than accept.
- Concentration on their side: if your order is a large share of their output, you gain leverage and inherit their fragility.
- Willingness to say who else they make for in your category, and whether that creates a conflict.
- Whether the entity you pay is the entity that manufactures, and if not, why not.
- Evidence they can fund materials at the volume discussed — often the real reason behind a deposit request.
IP, tooling and what you leave behind
Vetting is also where you decide what a supplier will hold. The South-East Asia IP SME Helpdesk flags tooling specifically: where the supplier paid for the tools and the agreement is terminated, you may be unable to recover them or move them elsewhere, whereas ownership gives you a right of recovery. It also recommends preventing third-party access to the production area and arranging unannounced visits.
It records one case with a number attached: an SME sourcing in Malaysia had not registered its trade mark there, a subcontractor registered it instead, and the SME had to pay a substantial sum to recover ownership before it could move production — against a registration the guidance puts at under EUR 300, excluding agent fees, had it been filed first. The contractual side is in NNN agreements in sourcing.
Location, ports and the part nobody checks
Distance from the plant to a suitable port, the mode options on that lane and the quality of inland transport all affect delivered cost and your ability to recover a delay. Two factories quoting the same unit price from different provinces are not quoting the same product — see landed cost.
Monitoring, because vetting is not a gate you pass once
A factory that qualified eighteen months ago has since changed staff, machines, customers and possibly ownership. Decide before the first order what you track per shipment — inspection results and defect types, on-time delivery against the confirmed date, response time on a quality issue, and whether the last corrective action was implemented. The value is the trend, which is why it has to be recorded rather than remembered.
How Library of Trade approaches it
Library of Trade is not a directory, and vetting is not a lookup. Suppliers are evaluated through documentation, factory assessments, production history, audits and physical visits, and the relationship is expected to outlast one order — which is what makes performance history worth holding. AI structures and compares; people judge a specific factory for a specific product, and the buyer contracts directly with the supplier.
- Factory vetting checklist
- Business licence or registration extract obtained and read
- Registered name matches the trading name, the contract and the bank beneficiary
- Registered and production addresses both known, and the difference explained
- Required manufacturing process confirmed to run in-house
- Machine list for your process reviewed, with count and age
- Named products in your category, with specifications and dates
- Capacity confirmed against your volumes in your delivery window
- MOQ and lead time in writing, with material and production time split out
- Subcontracting disclosed — which operations, and to whom
- Certificates verified at the issuing body: holder, validity and scope
- Audit report read: standard, auditor, date, findings, corrective actions
- One reference asked what went wrong and how the factory responded
- Physical or live video verification of the production site
- Sample approved against written measurable criteria, and retained
- Tooling and design-file ownership agreed in writing before tooling is cut
- Delivered cost compared, not unit price
- Per-order performance measures defined, with a trigger for a decline