Do not purchase any regulated products without first ensuring the manufacturer provides you with legitimate and relevant certificates and reports. Otherwise, you might be in trouble down the road if products are found to be unsafe or non-compliant (the importer will typically bear all the liability).
Our team verifies your supplier’s documentation, such as a CE certificate and associated test results, to give you the peace of mind that they’re legitimate documents.
Note: if you are unsure what documents are needed, you need to research that first. (We only provide consulting on this to our regular clients, not to new clients, but we can suggest sources of information.)
Sofeast’s team reviews your potential supplier’s certificates & test results (for example, certificates that products conform to various safety standards required by your country) in order to verify their legitimacy.
This is all done from our office, based on documents you send to us, without us contacting your supplier.
We follow this checklist when verifying supplier certificates:
- Verify those documents on official websites or on the certification body’s website. Note that, in some cases, the certificate/registration issuer doesn’t allow for this type of verification, so we cannot guarantee a result.
- Do those registrations and approvals show the same company name & address as the business registration (if you send it to us)?
- Look in the full test report and point to red flags, such as:
- Do they mention the right standard and the right device class?
- Do they include all the important tests?
- Is the issuing organization in the list of accredited test labs, or the list of authorized notified bodies?
- Do the dates all make sense? For example, a company created last year can’t have certificates in its name with earlier dates.
If you have gone ahead with certificate verification, the next step that we recommend is checking supplier legal records. (Especially common in China; for other countries the situation is different and we can confirm what can be checked on a case by case basis.) This is where we dig into their business’s legitimacy and check existing local-language legal documents about them for accuracy:
If the potential supplier you’re vetting turns out to be unsuitable, and if you are struggling to find an alternative, we can work on listing and screening alternative candidates for you.
We provide you with our New Factory Identification Solution in which we locate an export-ready supplier that seems to fit your needs. (After that, on-site audits are needed to confirm they are a good fit and present a low risk profile.)
Even if you’ve validated a supplier, due diligence needs to be performed on a product (or component) that is already developed (or is being developed) to assure that they won’t lead to costly safety issues or recalls later on.
For this, get a quotation on a 360-Degree Product Risk Assessment. (The price is much higher, as it usually involves a lot of specialist work.)
How much do certificate verification checks on a Chinese company cost?
99 USD for up to 5 documents in the same general product category from up to 3 different suppliers.
For larger jobs, we charge 20 USD per additional document starting with the 6th document.
Lead time: 2 working days.
