A convincing website and a fast quote tell you nothing about whether a factory can hold tolerance at volume. These are the checks our sourcing team runs before a single unit is booked.
Why the first order is the risky one
Most sourcing failures are not fraud. They are capability gaps — a factory that can produce a flawless sample in its tool room but cannot hold the same tolerance across a 40,000-unit run, or a workshop that quietly subcontracts half your order to a neighbour you have never audited.
The cost lands late. You discover it when the container is already at sea, the letter of credit is drawn, and your buyer is waiting. Vetting is cheap by comparison.
The five checks
Run these in order. Each one is a gate: fail it and the next check is wasted effort.
Legal and financial standing
Business licence, export licence, VAT registration and a credit check. A factory that cannot produce these in 48 hours is not export-ready, whatever the sales contact says.
Capacity against your volume
Ask for line count, shift pattern and current utilisation, then compare that to your monthly requirement. If you would be more than 30% of their output, you are carrying their business risk.
A physical audit
Someone walks the floor. Photographs of the lines, the QC station, the raw-material store and the loading bay — taken that day, not from a brochure.
Certification validity
ISO, CE, FDA and RoHS certificates all carry an issuing body and an expiry. Verify both with the registrar directly; expired and borrowed certificates are common.
A paid pre-production sample
Never accept a free sample from the tool room. Pay for one made on the production line, to your spec, and test it against the tolerance you will hold them to.
What good looks like
A factory worth a long relationship answers questions with documents rather than reassurance, tells you what it cannot do, and gives you a named production contact who is not the salesperson.
Every supplier on the F2B network has cleared all five gates before it appears in a buyer’s shortlist, and we re-audit on a rolling basis rather than once at onboarding.