Vietnam has become one of the most active alternative manufacturing hubs for companies diversifying out of China, but “active” doesn’t mean “easy.” The same openness that’s made the market accessible to new buyers has also made it easy to end up working with the wrong supplier: a trading company posing as a factory, a factory that subcontracts your order without telling you, or a legitimate manufacturer that simply can’t hold your spec at scale.
Here’s the practical checklist we use before recommending any supplier to a client.
1. Confirm you’re talking to a factory, not a trading company
This is the single most common point of confusion for new buyers. A factory owns and operates the production line; a trading company sources from one or more factories and adds a margin in between. Neither is automatically wrong: trading companies can add real value through consolidation, English-language communication, and smaller minimum order quantities, but you need to know which one you’re dealing with.
Ask directly: “Do you manufacture this in-house, or do you work with subcontracted factories?” A legitimate supplier will answer plainly. Evasiveness, or a refusal to name the actual production facility, is a signal worth taking seriously.
2. Verify business registration and export history
Every legally operating manufacturer in Vietnam has a business registration certificate. Ask for it, along with export documentation showing they’ve shipped to other international buyers, ideally in your product category. A supplier with zero verifiable export history isn’t automatically disqualifying (everyone starts somewhere), but it changes your risk calculus and should shift more of your budget toward inspection and smaller initial orders.
3. Get on the production floor, in person or through a trusted third party
Photos and video calls show you what a factory wants you to see. An in-person visit (or a third-party audit if travel isn’t practical) lets you assess real production capacity, working conditions, and whether the equipment on the floor actually matches what’s needed for your product. This is also where subcontracting arrangements tend to surface: if the “factory” you’re touring doesn’t have the machinery for your product category, ask why.
4. Run a structured quality check before you scale volume
Before committing to a full production run, a small trial order combined with a pre-shipment inspection tells you far more than any number of sample approvals. Samples are, by definition, made carefully and by hand. Full production runs are not. AQL-based sampling inspection on the actual production batch, checking dimensions, materials, workmanship, and packaging against your spec sheet, is the step that catches problems before they’re sitting in a container on the water.
5. Understand pricing structure, not just the quoted price
A quote that’s meaningfully lower than every other supplier you’ve spoken to is a flag, not a win. Ask what’s included: tooling costs, packaging, quality control, and Incoterms all shift the real landed cost. Suppliers competing purely on headline price sometimes make up the difference by cutting corners on materials or quality control, exactly where you don’t want corners cut.
6. Watch for incentive misalignment in your own sourcing process
If the person helping you find a supplier is being paid by that supplier (a referral fee, a commission, a hidden markup), their incentive to flag problems is weaker than yours. This is worth asking your sourcing partner directly: “Do you take any payment from the factories you introduce me to?” The answer tells you a lot about whose interests are actually being represented.
The bottom line
None of these steps are exotic. They’re standard due diligence that experienced importers already do instinctively. The companies that get burned are almost always skipping one of them under time or budget pressure. Building in a factory audit and a pre-shipment inspection as non-negotiable steps, regardless of how good a supplier looks on paper, is the cheapest insurance available in the entire sourcing process.
If you’re evaluating a supplier in Vietnam and want an independent, on-the-ground assessment before you commit, get in touch. We work exclusively for buyers, never for the factories we evaluate.