Dear Bill,

This is Echo from Alibaba International Customer Service Team.
Thank you for your question. Alibaba.com is intended to be a business-to-business platform with the mission to make it easy to do business anywhere. We take trust and safety very seriously and work hard to tackle unfair practices on our marketplace. We’ve developed a number of policies and procedures to tackle fraud, and systems of authentication and verification, including our Gold Supplier and Verified Membership schemes.

Despite our safety measures, we also recommend all users to conduct their own due diligence before making an order with a new supplier. Hiring a local inspection is also a solution. We understand that it could incur extra costs but this can ensure that you are happy with the quality of the products you receive. The other suggestion is to order a sample first before you making bulk purchases.

We also have Trade Assurance Service, which covers buyers on Alibaba.com with 100% payment protection with their selected Trade Assurance supplier. To read more about Trade Assurance on Alibaba.com, please visit http://tradeassurance.alibaba.com/bao/buyer_advertise.htm?spm=a2700.7224109.a271qf.38.aXygss&tracelog=from_home_menu.

And if you would like to check the reputation of a certain supplier you found on Alibaba.com, you can get live help via our 24 hour live chat at: http://service.alibaba.com/buyer/contact_us.htm?spm.

Kind regards and happy trading,
Echo
Alibaba International Customer Service Team

Hi Ed,

I would not advice you to make any big purchases. The problem is the trade mentality: Everything is ok to do, as long as I can make a buck or two more...
We've learnt that Chinese trade mentality is different from the west. They start off with showing great samples and your first couple of smaller orders will look okay. Then when your company grows and your orders get bigger, they start to feel confident in cheating with the quality of the products. You will notice a slight change in the beginning, until you start having complains from your customers. We did this mistake. Our products webt directly to our drop shipper, so we never noticed the quality change. We were trusting these traders and got burnt seriously. We had to throw away one order of $30000. It went straight into the garbage... The best way to set up a serious quality business is to go to China. Meet face to face, find a quality controller (its cheap to find a person that can help you check the quality). We now pay 20% up front, and the rest once our controller has seen the quality of the products.