Before You Pay a Chinese Supplier: Who’s Selling, and Who’s Actually Collecting?

This is a guest post by Bao L. Zhou.

Picture a routine order. A U.S. importer has signed off on the sample and agreed to the deposit. The supplier sent over a business license. Everything looks wrapped up — right up until someone in accounting prepares the wire and spots that the beneficiary isn’t the company named in the contract.

The salesperson’s answer comes back fast: “That’s our other company.”

Fair enough, that explains the second name. What it doesn’t explain is where your money goes next. If that recipient cashes the deposit, will the seller treat the order as paid? And if the goods never show up, which of the two companies has to fix it?

You want that answer in writing, filed with the order — not as a reassuring line in a chat thread.

Go Back to the Seller’s Name

Start with the contract. The business actually selling you the goods may be a trading company, even when the license sitting in your inbox belongs to the factory. If so, ask for the seller’s own registration details. A second copy of the factory license does nothing for you here.

For a mainland Chinese company, get the full Chinese registered name plus the 18-character Unified Social Credit Code, and ask for both as plain text you can paste into the official business registry. Save what comes back, note the date, and record the registration status.

There’s a translation trap that’s easy for an English-speaking buyer to walk into. China’s enterprise-name rules require registered names in standard Chinese characters; foreign-language versions are allowed, but they’re just translations. So the English name printed on your contract has to be tied back to the registered Chinese name. Get the seller to state that link plainly. Don’t infer it yourself because two names happen to sound alike.

If the seller is registered in Hong Kong, use Hong Kong’s own system — a mainland registry check won’t cover it. And when a mainland search turns up nothing, check the boring stuff first: your spelling, the code, whether the site was even working. Until you’ve ruled those out, “not found” is an unfinished check, not a red flag.

Pull the invoice into the comparison as well. Its issuer should match the seller; the order reference, goods, amount, currency and payment terms should match the contract. If the issuer turns out to be a third company, that’s one more party whose role needs explaining.

Ask What the Second Company Is Authorized to Do

Back to the deposit from the opening example. Call the contract seller Company A and the beneficiary Company B — placeholders, not a real customer case.

“We use Company B for payments” glosses over a nasty possibility: the money lands at B, and A never credits it to your order.

So ask A to confirm in writing that paying this deposit to B settles the deposit due on this specific order. Get B’s registered identity, plus the agreement or authorization that lets B collect. Those documents should name B and the order itself — a vague “our companies work together” letter isn’t enough.

You also need to know who stays on the hook for delivery and for defective goods. Look for that in the contract, and have any unclear legal wording reviewed before you count on it.

Sometimes the mismatch is nothing more than a shortened or romanized account name rather than a separate company. Ask for bank-issued evidence of the account name, and ask your own bank what it can validate. Keep every name exactly as it appears in the original paperwork. Tidying one up to make the comparison look neat destroys the very detail you’re checking.

None of this paperwork replaces an independent confirmation. Before the first transfer, call an authorized representative of the seller using contact details you got separately from the payment request, and confirm the recipient and account. If identity or authority is still murky, the deposit stays on hold.

A Revised Invoice Can Undo Yesterday’s Check

Say accounts payable has your approval but hasn’t sent the money yet. A replacement invoice lands, with a new bank account.

The order number is the same. The email might even sit in the same thread. Neither fact makes the old approval valid.

The FBI’s business email compromise guidance describes criminals hijacking genuine email conversations — this is exactly the moment they’re waiting for. Call a verified phone number you found independently of the change message and confirm the new instructions. Write down who you spoke to, when, which order, and which account details were confirmed.

Then make the change impossible to miss for whoever sends the money. File the revised invoice together with that confirmation, and mark the earlier approval as superseded. Otherwise “approved” in yesterday’s email reads like permission to pay a different account today.

Currawong’s China supplier bank account check guide offers fields for recording the comparison and for handling changed instructions. Handy for organizing evidence — but it doesn’t verify who owns a bank account.

Keep all of it in one place: license, contract, invoice, payment instructions, confirmations. Someone opening the payment file cold should be able to follow the arrangement without piecing together a week of emails.

And even when every name lines up, copied documents and unauthorized requests are still possible. Registration checks say nothing about whether a factory makes the product well or ships on time; that’s separate work. For this deposit, the open question is narrower: did the seller authorize this recipient, for this order — and does the payment file show how you confirmed it?

This was a guest post by Bao L. Zhou.

Author Bio

Bao L. Zhou (Derrick) runs Currawong in Jinan, China. Currawong provides paid reports on Chinese supplier registration records and publishes practical guides for overseas buyers. He has a commercial interest in the Currawong resource referenced in this article.