How verification works

What the mark means

"Verified by YCP" means a member of our staff has visited that factory in person, read its business licence for the manufacturing scope it claims, and seen the line running. We record who verified it and when. It is a mark about a company, and a visit is the only thing that earns it.

A certificate is a different object under a different rule: a certificate is displayed once a named factory has uploaded the actual document, the upload has been confirmed, the file has not been withdrawn and the expiry date has not passed — and it is displayed marked "Unverified by YCP", because we have not been to the body that issued it. Where no document has reached us, nothing is displayed at all: a certificate a factory names but never files appears nowhere on this site.

It does not mean the factory is the cheapest, and it does not mean nothing will ever go wrong. It means a specific, checkable thing happened on a specific date.

Re-verification, and why one visit is not enough

A factory verified in 2021 and never revisited tells you about a building that may have changed hands twice. Verification is re-checked on a schedule rather than granted once, and a factory carries the mark only while there is a visit behind it — so a factory with no visit recorded against it carries no mark, rather than a badge that has quietly gone stale.

If you are about to place a significant order and you want to know when we were last inside that factory, ask us. If the answer is old, we will go again before the deposit is paid.

The firewall between money and the mark

Factories buy visibility from us: where they appear in a category list, whether their registered name is shown publicly, and whether they are eligible for a featured slot. That is a normal advertising relationship and we would rather state it than disguise it.

What money cannot touch is the verification record. It is held separately from every placement field in the system, and no membership, renewal or featured slot writes to it. This separation is borrowed from the one major platform in this industry that gets it right — a paid membership tier and an independently audited supplier mark, kept as two entirely different things.

If a factory ever offers to pay for the mark, the answer is no, and the reason is commercial rather than moral: selling it once would make every other listing on this site worth less.

One distinction has to be drawn here rather than left to the reader, because a paid service now sits close to this paragraph. Establishing whether a certificate is genuine is a different act on a different object, and it can be ordered — by a buyer who wants to know before committing, or by a factory that wants the unverified marker taken off its own certificate. We quote it against the document in front of us and we say what it involves before we start. What it can never buy is the supplier mark this page is about: no amount of certificate checking earns a factory that mark, because the mark is the output of a visit and nothing else writes to it.

Paid placement is labelled

Where a factory has paid for a featured slot against a specific product, that slot carries a visible Featured marker. We separately tell you that each enquiry is routed to the right factory for the job, and those two statements must never be allowed to look like the same statement. The label is what keeps them apart.