Factory or trading company
Most buyers sourcing from China cannot tell whether the company quoting them actually makes the product or resells it, because the badges that look like verification are mostly paid memberships. These are the checks that genuinely tell you apart, in rough order of how much each one reveals. None of them is a guarantee, and every one of them you can do yourself.
1. Read the business licence scope
Every Chinese company has a business licence stating its registered scope. Manufacturing scope contains the characters for production or manufacturing, written as 生产 or 制造. A pure trading company shows only trade wording, 贸易 or 商贸. Ask for the licence and read that line. A company whose scope contains no manufacturing verb is not the one making your product, whatever the website says. This single check settles most cases.
2. Judge catalogue depth, not breadth
A real factory goes deep in one narrow category, because it owns tooling and a production line for it. A trading company sells broadly across unrelated categories, because it is reselling whatever it can source. Search the company name together with 有限公司 and look at the spread of what they offer. Twenty variations of one product is a factory signal. Kitchenware next to electronics next to garden furniture is not.
3. Triangulate the price against the domestic market
1688 is Alibaba's Chinese-language domestic wholesale platform, where Chinese factories sell to Chinese buyers. Find the identical item there by image search and compare. If an export quote sits well above the domestic street price for the same item, you are likely paying a middleman layer. Two honest caveats: neither number includes MOQ commitments, freight, insurance or import duty, and domestic and export specifications sometimes genuinely differ.
4. Put the address on a map
A registered address in an industrial park is consistent with manufacturing. A unit in a downtown office tower is consistent with an office. This takes ten seconds and is often decisive. Read it as a signal rather than proof: a trading company can rent industrial space, and a genuine factory can keep a separate city sales office.
5. Treat badges as memberships, not proof
Gold Supplier, Verified and similar marketplace labels are largely paid memberships plus a registration check. They confirm that a company exists, paid a fee, and submitted documents. They do not confirm who physically makes the product, what the quality is, or whether the company will still be there next year. Read them as "this company invested in selling to foreigners", which is useful but different.
What none of this proves
All of the above reads public information, which can be stale, incomplete or presented favourably. These checks move you from trusting a badge to weighing evidence you can look at yourself, which is a large improvement and still not certainty. The only things that settle it are a person asking the seller directly in Chinese, obtaining the licence, requesting production evidence, or visiting. Do that before a deposit, not after.
Where Sourcia fits
Sourcia is an iOS app that automates the search side of this. You photograph a product and it image-searches 1688 for that item, returning matching product and seller listings, the seller's own published product and factory pictures kept separate, an address and map where one is resolvable, and a Chinese-language request-for-quote draft with the specifications you still need to ask about. Every lead is labelled for how much of it is actually proven, and nothing is called verified until a person has checked it. Free to try: 5 searches a day, no account needed. Sourcia is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by 1688 or Alibaba.