China sourcing intelligence — verify before you wire
Every importer's nightmare is the same: money wired to a "factory" that turns out to be a 2-person trading company — or worse. These guides are the systems that prevent it: six verification steps, a line-by-line business license decoder, the payment safety hierarchy, and the platform choice map.
The five deep guides + one build log
1 · How to Verify a Chinese Supplier
The 6-step VERIFY system — registration, facilities, export record, identity, international signals, yields. The complete pre-wire checklist.
2 · How to Read a Chinese Business License
Nine fields, line by line, plus the four-name cross-check that catches most fakes in ten minutes. Free verification channels included.
3 · How to Pay a Chinese Supplier Safely
The payment safety hierarchy: Trade Assurance → L/C → T/T 30/70 → staged. Four scam patterns and the recovery sequence when it goes wrong.
4 · Alibaba vs 1688 in 2026
Prices, MOQs, scam recovery, and when each platform actually wins. Why the 30% gap is real — and when it inverts.
5 · What Suppliers Say vs. What They Mean
The bilingual decoder: 12 high-stakes phrases translated from the Chinese side of the table — and the move that converts each to paper.
6 · How to Order Samples Without Getting Played
Who pays for what, stock → custom → golden, the photo-sample trap — and the 4-message sequence that turns a sample into a written spec.
7 · Golden Week 2026: The 14-Day Blackout
Mid-Autumn sits 3 workdays before National Day — the real factory calendar, deadlines by shipping mode, the pre-holiday quality trap, and the week-after playbook. CNY 2027 is 11 days early: the calendar is the story.
8 · How to Read a Supplier's Quotation
EXW/FOB/CIF decoding, the line items quotes quietly drop, unit-price math traps — and the 3 questions that surface the real total.
🛠 · The GitHub Sales Machine (build log)
How this desk sells on GitHub with zero platforms: email state machine, on-chain USDT verification, private-repo delivery. The full machinery, with honest numbers.
Free tools
🧮 Landed Cost Calculator
FOB price + freight + duty + VAT = the true per-unit cost. Interactive, in-browser, post-de-minimis 2026 edition.
🚩 Supplier Red-Flag Checker
12 questions scoring any Chinese supplier against the VERIFY system — with the 3 dealbreakers that override any score.
🧧 CNY 2027 Order Deadline Calculator
Chinese New Year lands 11 days earlier in 2027. Find your last safe order date — production + freight + the real factory shutdown calendar.
🛒 Black Friday 2026 Deadline Calculator
The real inventory deadline is ~Nov 20, not the 27th. Which freight modes still make it, and the CNY bridge play if yours doesn't.
🗣 Supplier Reply Decoder
Paste any supplier email. Bilingual pattern scan for vague commitments, dodges, pressure tactics and payment red flags — plus a custom AI prompt for line-by-line analysis.
Also written
The China Sourcing Playbook 2026
All 25 negotiation templates (license requests, payment structuring, quality claims, IP protection), the payment-safety tier system as a working checklist, 10 AI sourcing prompts, and the 7-day first-order sprint.
Launch window closed Oct 1 — the standard rate is $19. — email assassinationss@163.com with subject "Playbook" for payment details and same-day access.
🎁 Want a taste first? Click to email us with subject "Sample" — 2 AI sourcing prompts + the quality-claim template, back by return mail.
Get the Playbook → Free toolkit on GitHub