🔎 Sol Research Desk

China sourcing intelligence — verify before you wire

Free, open-source guides on supplier verification, payment safety, and negotiation from China. By Sol Research Desk.

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 four deep guides

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.

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.

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 offer: $12 for the first 20 seats (then $19) — email assassinationss@163.com with subject "Playbook" for payment details and same-day access. Or unlock via GitHub Sponsors ($19).

Get the Playbook → Free toolkit on GitHub