Most sellers who get burned in wholesale were never dealing with a supplier at all. Not a distributor who let them down. An operation that never held stock, never shipped a pallet, and never planned to.
The trade has a rough name for the model: list-selling. Someone builds a clean website, fills it with brand logos they have no relationship with, collects inquiries from marketplace sellers, and then sells the inquiry on, brokers the order to somebody else, or simply keeps the deposit. The websites are good now. Some of them look better than real distributors' sites, because a real distributor spends its money on inventory and a fake one spends it on the storefront.
So the useful question isn't whether a supplier looks real. It's which checks a fake supplier can't pass. Here is the order to run them, cheapest first.
Start with the entity, not the website
Every US state runs a free business entity search through its Secretary of State. Four things to pull: a legal name that matches what's on the website and what will appear on the invoice, an active status, the formation date, and the registered agent.
The formation date is the one people skip. A company claiming ten years of trading on an entity registered eight months ago either traded under a different name before, which is common and legitimate and something they should volunteer without being asked, or it is describing somebody else's history as its own.
Registered agent addresses need a bit of care. A mass commercial agent address is not a red flag by itself; plenty of real companies incorporate that way. It becomes one when the same address is also given as the warehouse. So ask where stock is actually held and who signs for it at the door.
The W-9 test
Request a completed W-9. It takes a real business about thirty seconds, and it gives you the legal name, entity type, address and EIN, signed.
There's no public IRS database where you can type in an EIN and see whose it is. The IRS TIN Matching service is restricted to payers who file information returns and are already listed in its Payer Account File, which rules out almost everyone doing supplier diligence. So a W-9 isn't proof on its own. What it does is force a supplier to commit in writing to a legal identity you can then cross-check against the state record, and against the bank details that later show up on the invoice. For a US-domiciled company, refusing to provide one is unusual enough to stop on.
Notice which way the paperwork is flowing
Real wholesale has a direction. You give the supplier a resale certificate. They do not give you one. If nobody ever asks for yours, that tells you they don't expect anyone to audit them.
Most states accept the Multistate Tax Commission's Uniform Sales & Use Tax Resale Certificate — Multijurisdiction, currently revised as of October 14, 2022. It lists all fifty states plus the District of Columbia, but several attach conditions: Maine directs purchasers to Maine Revenue Services, Hawaii applies a lower rate rather than an exemption, and Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and Vermont limit it to straight resale. The MTC's own guidance warns that states can change their acceptance policy without telling the Commission, so treat the certificate as a starting point rather than a guarantee.
For vetting purposes the detail matters less than the fluency. Handled without prompting, it's been done before. Waved off with "don't worry about that," it hasn't.
Ask for documents that can only exist after a real shipment
A completed order leaves a trail. A commercial invoice, a packing list, and a transport document: a bill of lading for ocean freight, an air waybill for air.
Request a redacted set from a past shipment. Prices, customer names and routes can all come out, and you should expect them to. What's left behind is the interesting part. Document structure, gross and net weights, piece counts, carrier details, the terms block. That material is difficult to fabricate convincingly and pointless to fake for a single prospect.
Invoice specifics matter downstream too. If you intend to submit supplier documentation to a marketplace, it has to read like a commercial document: the supplier's legal name, full address and working contact details, your business name and address matching your seller account, a date, and itemized products with quantities. Packing slips, order confirmations, pro forma invoices and receipts are a different class of document and tend to get treated as one.
We'll state our own position plainly here, since this is our category. No supplier controls what a marketplace decides, and no document can promise you an outcome. A distributor-issued letter of authorization is worth nothing to Amazon in particular; it is a letter a company writes about itself. What a supplier can do is issue accurate commercial paperwork for goods it genuinely sold you. That's the whole of the offer, and anyone extending it further is selling you something else.
One more thing on invoices. A company that has traded with marketplace sellers before will already produce them in the right shape. A company that asks you what you'd like the invoice to say is a different proposition, and the conversation should end there.
Check the insurance properly
Ask for a certificate of liability insurance. In the US that's usually an ACORD 25.
Three things to check. The named insured must match the legal entity exactly, not a trading name and not an affiliate. The policy dates must cover your order window. The insurer's five-digit NAIC number should resolve to a real carrier.
One detail catches people out. Being listed as certificate holder gives you no coverage whatsoever; it records that you received the form. Actual protection requires additional insured status and the endorsement page sitting behind it. And a certificate showing signs of manual alteration is not a certificate.
For anything load-bearing, electrical or life-safety, this stops being an administrative step.
Payment method is the loudest signal on the page
The FTC has been blunt about wire transfers for years: when something goes wrong, the buyer is likely to lose the payment and have no recourse. A wire sits closer to cash than to a card.
A supplier that can accept card payment has been underwritten by a payment processor, holds a merchant account, and carries chargeback exposure on every single transaction. That's a continuing third-party check on their conduct, and no amount of website copy imitates it. Operations built on taking deposits rarely keep a merchant account for long, because disputes close it. A processing fee passed on for card payment is normal and should be disclosed up front; a company that can only take wire may have a reason for that.
Whatever the method, the receiving account name has to match the legal entity. Payment to a personal account, to a third party, or to a temporary account because the usual one is "under review" — those are not administrative hiccups.
The questions a list-seller can't answer
Send these. The answers come back quickly from a real operation, and slowly or vaguely from anyone else.
- Where is the stock held, and who signs for it?
- Which transport document will I receive, and who is named as shipper?
- What Incoterms do you trade on, and where do title and risk transfer?
- If a carton arrives short, what is the claims window, and who files with the carrier?
- What's the lead time on this item, and is it from your own stock or from the brand's distribution point?
- Will the invoice come from the same legal entity named on the purchase order?
- What do you need from me to open an account?
That last one is the real tell. A wholesale account has an opening process: at minimum, evidence of a registered business entity and a resale certificate. A company willing to sell to anyone who lands on the page has no account process, which usually means no account system, which usually means no distribution business behind any of it.
Don't be reassured by an eager supplier. Be reassured by one that wants something from you before it will quote.
And what a real supplier will refuse to tell you
Expect some doors to stay shut. Sourcing routes, upstream relationships and other customers' terms are commercially sensitive, and anyone who hands them over on a first call will hand yours over just as easily.
Draw the line in the right place, though. Refusing to disclose confidential commercial detail is professional. Refusing to explain how the transaction works — payment, documents, freight, claims — is not, and no confidentiality argument covers it.
Your own paperwork is part of this now
Since the INFORM Consumers Act took effect on June 27, 2023, online marketplaces have had to collect bank account information, a tax ID and working contact details from high-volume third-party sellers, then verify them. The threshold is 200 or more separate sales of new or unused consumer products and at least $5,000 in gross revenues within a continuous twelve-month period during the previous twenty-four months. Marketplaces get ten days to collect and verify, and sellers certify annually that the information is still current.
That regime is aimed at your identity rather than your supplier's. But it points in the same direction. Marketplaces want to know who is selling and where the goods came from, and the documentation behind a purchase is no longer something anyone can reconstruct after the fact.
Start small on purpose
None of this replaces a test order. Place something modest, watch how the paperwork arrives, check that the invoice matches the purchase order and that the entity on the bank details matches the entity on the invoice. Then scale.
Nobody should send five figures to a company whose bill of lading they've never seen.
How we handle this
We open accounts on evidence of a registered business entity and a resale certificate, and we'll answer every question above in writing before anyone sends money. What we won't tell you is that a document guarantees an approval. It doesn't, and a supplier who says otherwise is describing a decision that was never theirs to make.