Free guide
Five asks no registry can answer
Any company check — the business licence, the customs registration, a
third-party verification report — tells you that a company exists and
what it is permitted to do. None of them tell you how that company behaves
when something goes wrong. These five questions do.
Every one of these is answerable in a single email, and almost none of them
appear in a standard supplier questionnaire. That is the point: the answers
are cheap to give before the order and expensive to obtain afterwards.
01
What happens to my order when their line stops?
A registration certificate says a company exists and is licensed. It says nothing about what happens on the morning the power goes out, the die breaks, or the operator who runs your product quits. Ask for the plan, not the reassurance. A written continuity plan names the alternate line, the buffer stock level, and who decides to invoke it. Most small factories have never been asked, which is exactly why the answer tells you something.
What a useful answer looks like
A specific alternate site or line, by name. A stated buffer quantity. A named decision-maker. If the answer is "we will manage it", there is no plan.
02
Is there product liability cover, and who is the insurer?
Chinese product liability insurance is available and common among export-oriented factories, but it is not universal and it is not visible in any public registry. The certificate of insurance is a one-page document. Ask for it as a document, not as a statement. This matters most for anything a consumer puts on skin or in a mouth, where a single recall can exceed the value of the order many times over.
What a useful answer looks like
The certificate itself, with insurer name, policy number, coverage limit and expiry date. A policy that expired last year is not cover.
03
How does this end, and who owns the tooling?
Every supply relationship ends eventually. The expensive part is not the ending, it is discovering at that moment that the mould was paid for by you but sits on their floor, the artwork file lives on their designer's laptop, and the specification exists only in an email thread. None of this is in a registration record. All of it is decided by contract language that most buyers never read until it is too late.
What a useful answer looks like
Written ownership of tooling, files and specifications. A notice period in days. A stated process for the physical return or transfer of moulds.
04
What are the response and resolution times, in numbers?
A supplier who answers in four hours and a supplier who answers in four days are different businesses, but both will describe themselves as responsive. Adjectives are not commitments. The useful question is not "are you responsive" but "how many hours until someone acknowledges a quality claim, and how many days until a corrective action is proposed". Ask it before the first order, when the answer is still cheap to give.
What a useful answer looks like
Two numbers: hours to acknowledge, days to propose corrective action. Both written into the agreement rather than promised in conversation.
05
Who exactly runs production, and who owns my account?
On the sales side you usually talk to one person. On the production side there is another person, and that person has never heard of you. When a problem appears, the gap between those two people is where time is lost. Ask for both names, and ask which one signs off on a deviation from the agreed specification. The answer is frequently "we will check with the workshop", which means nobody has that authority in writing.
What a useful answer looks like
Two named people, with roles. A named person authorised to approve or reject a deviation. If approval authority is unclear, every future dispute starts from zero.
Why these five and not the licence number
A registration record is positive knowledge: it confirms what is declared.
Everything that actually costs money in a supply relationship is negative
knowledge — what is not covered, what is not written down, who is not
accountable. Negative knowledge cannot be looked up. It has to be asked
for, and the shape of the answer tells you as much as the content.
A supplier who has been asked these before answers them in one paragraph
with specifics. A supplier who has not will send you a paragraph about
their commitment to quality. Both are informative.
Want these put to your supplier, and the answers checked?
This is what the supplier verification report does: the five asks above,
plus the entity and factory checks, written up with what was answered,
what was evaded, and what could not be established either way.
See what the report covers