Do I need a supplier evaluation service in China, or can I do it myself?
Q: Do I need a supplier evaluation service in China, or can I do it myself?
Honest answer. A good chunk of it you can and should do yourself, and you'll understand your own supplier better for having done it. The trick is knowing where your reach ends.
Here's what you can do from your desk, no service needed. Check the business license and confirm the company is real and registered for what they claim. Search the company name and see what comes back. Ask them to walk you through how the product is made, and pay attention to how specific the answers get, because vague answers often mean there's a layer in between. Ask for a live video of the production line rather than photos. Confirm the registered address is an actual plant. Get a sample, then a small first order, before you ever talk volume. None of that costs more than your time and a sample fee, and it filters out most of the obvious risk.
Where a service earns its keep is the part you physically can't do from another country. Standing in the factory and confirming the line is theirs and not borrowed for the call. Watching your goods get made and checking them against your spec while they're still on the floor, not after they're boxed and on a boat. Catching the gap between what you ordered and what's actually in the carton, at the point where it's still cheap to fix. That on-the-ground layer is what distance takes away from you, and relative to what a bad batch costs, it's usually the cheapest insurance in the whole order.
So the way to think about it isn't do it yourself or pay someone. It's this. Do the desk-level verification yourself, and bring in independent eyes for the in-person checks where being thousands of miles away is the actual problem. Spend on the part you can't cover, not the part you can.
If you'd rather not fly over for it, having someone on the ground run the in-person checks is exactly what we do.