Site visit, video walkthrough, or full audit
They answer different questions, and the price gap between them is roughly tenfold. Paying for the wrong one is how buyers either overspend or arrive at a decision with nothing behind it.
Written by a practitioner with ten years of legal and asset-disposal work, including risk-control and legal functions at the head office of one of China’s largest banking institutions.
Four levels, four different questions
| Level | The question it answers | Published market cost |
|---|---|---|
| Desk research registry, judicial, enforcement | Is the entity real, active, litigious, and who is behind it? | $9–$199 per report depending on provider and depth |
| Supplier-shot video | What does the site look like when the supplier chooses the camera angle? | Free, and worth about that |
| Independent site visit | Does the address exist, is it operating, and is it consistent with the claimed business? | $199.90 flat in the Pearl River Delta (our rate) |
| Technical factory audit AQL sampling, line inspection | Can they make your product to specification, repeatedly? | $350–$600 per inspector-day; $200–$1,500 for a basic verification audit depending on firm and scope; major international firms higher |
Market ranges above are the published 2026 rates of inspection and sourcing firms operating in China. They vary by city, scope, product complexity and urgency.
What a visit proves that no database can
- The address is a working premises — not a residential flat, a mail-forwarding address, or an empty unit
- Whether production is actually on site, or whether the site is an office in front of someone else’s plant
- Visible scale: lines, loading activity, staff presence, signage, nameplate against the entity name
- What the neighbours do — an industrial cluster is corroboration; a residential lane is not
What it cannot prove
- Whether quality holds across a full production run
- Whether the company can pay its debts — that is a records question, not a visual one
- Whether work is subcontracted to a site you were not shown
- Who actually owns the machines
Buyers regularly assume a visit answers the quality question. It does not. A visit answers the existence question, which is cheaper to ask and more often decisive.
Matching the spend to the order
| Order value | What is proportionate |
|---|---|
| Under $2,000 | Desk verification only. A visit would cost more than the exposure it removes. |
| $2,000–$10,000 | Desk verification with litigation read. Add a visit only if the address or the entity chain is unresolved. |
| $10,000–$50,000 | Independent visit before the deposit, plus a technical audit if the product is complex or regulated. |
| Over $50,000 | Visit, technical audit, and contract terms that stage payment against inspection. At this size the audit is cheap relative to one failed container. |
A rule of thumb used across the industry: spend 1–3% of order value on verification. The median loss in a Chinese supplier fraud runs to five figures; a visit plus an audit sits in the hundreds to low thousands.
Our boundary, stated plainly
We do site visits; we do not do audits. Our correspondent attends the registered address and observes what is publicly visible — the premises, the activity, the signage, the surrounding units — and returns timestamped photo and video evidence. We do not present ourselves as buyers, do not enter production areas under pretext, do not sample, and do not issue an AQL report. If you need a technical audit with line access and sampling, that is an inspection company’s job, and we will tell you so rather than sell you the wrong thing.
Frequently asked
Will the supplier know they were visited?
Possibly. A visit to a premises is observable, unlike document research. The correspondent does not identify you as the client and does not engage staff on your behalf; the observation covers what is publicly visible at and around the address.
Is a supplier-shot video walkthrough enough?
Only if a visit is genuinely unaffordable. A video shows what the supplier chose to show, framed as they chose to frame it, and it cannot confirm that the address is the registered address. It is better than nothing and weaker than it looks.
Can you visit outside the Pearl River Delta?
Yes, by individual quote rather than at the flat rate. Write to [email protected] with the address before ordering. If the location cannot be covered properly, we decline rather than improvise.
- Physical attendance at the registered address
- Timestamped photo and video evidence
- Flat rate across the Pearl River Delta
- Exterior and public-area observation only