How to Verify an Indian Supplier: A Step-by-Step Guide

Most fraud in Indian sourcing does not happen because someone was careless. It happens because the supplier looked completely normal. A clean WhatsApp catalogue, a GST number in the email signature, a confident voice on the call, a quote that is a little better than everyone else's. You send a 30% advance, and then the replies slow down.

I have watched enough of these go wrong to believe one thing: the difference between a deal that works and a deal that costs you money is almost always twenty minutes of checking before the first payment, not after. The good news is that India keeps an unusual amount of business information in public records. Almost everything you need to confirm a supplier is real is sitting on a government portal, free to look up. You just have to know which portal, and what a clean result actually looks like.

This is the hub guide. It walks through the full verification workflow in order, and each step links to a deeper post if you want the long version. If you only read one thing, read this.

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Step 1: Decide what "verified" needs to mean for this deal

Before any portal, get honest about the size of the risk. Verifying a supplier for a one-time ₹40,000 sample order is not the same as verifying one you are about to wire ₹8 lakh to for a custom production run.

A small, low-value, recoverable order needs a light touch — confirm the business exists and the bank details match the legal name. A large advance, a new relationship, or a custom order with no resale value needs the full checklist. Match the effort to what you would lose if it goes wrong.

For the complete framing of "is this supplier genuine," start with how to check if a supplier is genuine in India. It covers the judgment calls this guide assumes.

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Step 2: Verify the GSTIN

The GST number is the fastest sanity check you have. A GSTIN is 15 characters long and encodes the supplier's state and PAN. You can verify it free on the official GST portal at gst.gov.in using "Search Taxpayer."

What you are checking for:

• The legal name registered against the GSTIN — does it match the name on the quote, the invoice, and the bank account?
• The status — is it Active, or Cancelled / Suspended? A cancelled GSTIN on a business that claims to be running is a serious flag.
• The registration date and state — a brand-new registration on a "20-year-old factory" is worth a question.

The single most common scam pattern is a real, valid GSTIN that belongs to a different company than the one you are talking to — copied from a genuine business and pasted into a fraudster's signature. So do not stop at "the number is valid." Confirm the legal name on the portal is the same name you are paying.

Full walkthrough with screenshots and edge cases: how to verify the GST number of a supplier.

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Step 3: Check the IEC on the DGFT portal

If the supplier exports — or claims to — they need an Import Export Code (IEC). The IEC is issued by the DGFT (Directorate General of Foreign Trade), and you can look it up on the DGFT portal.

For exporters, a missing or invalid IEC is a contradiction: you cannot legally ship goods out of India without one. If a "regular exporter" cannot produce an IEC, or the one they give does not resolve, that gap matters.

It also helps you understand who you are dealing with. The IEC ties back to a PAN and an entity, and many traders confuse it with GST. If you are unclear on the distinction, read IEC vs GST: the difference for traders and the primer what is IEC for India importers.

Step-by-step lookup instructions: how to check an IEC code on the DGFT portal.

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Step 4: Confirm the entity on MCA21 (for companies and LLPs)

If the supplier is a Private Limited company or an LLP, it is registered with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, and the record is public on MCA21 at mca.gov.in.

There you can confirm the company exists, its incorporation date, its registered office, its directors, and whether it is Active or Strike Off / under liquidation. A company that presents itself as a serious manufacturer but shows up as struck off — or does not exist on MCA at all while claiming to be a "Pvt Ltd" — is telling you something.

Note the limit: sole proprietorships and ordinary partnership firms are not on MCA21. Many legitimate small Indian suppliers are proprietorships, so "not found on MCA" is only a flag if they specifically claimed to be a company. For those smaller firms, lean harder on GST, IEC, and an Udyam (MSME) registration where they have one.

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Step 5: Look up the B2B and platform footprint

Real suppliers usually leave a trail across the places Indian buyers actually source from — IndiaMART, TradeIndia, JustDial, ExportersIndia, and Alibaba for cross-border. A supplier with zero footprint, or a footprint that contradicts what they told you (a "manufacturer" whose only listing is a reseller profile), deserves more scrutiny.

But platform presence is not proof. A listing on IndiaMART or a Gold Supplier badge on Alibaba means the platform did some checks — it does not mean the company is honest with you, or that the bank account they sent over the phone is theirs.

Two posts cover the platform-specific traps in detail:

• IndiaMART supplier verification: avoiding scams
• Alibaba supplier verification for Indian importers

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Step 6: Establish manufacturer vs trader

A lot of disputes come down to a mismatch you could have caught early: you thought you were buying from the factory, but you were buying from a middleman who is now sourcing it themselves — adding margin, adding delay, and adding a layer between you and any quality problem.

There is nothing wrong with buying from a trader; you just need to know, because it changes your pricing, your lead times, and who is accountable when a batch is off-spec. The tells are in the GST profile, the address, the way they answer technical questions, and what their own documents say.

How to read the signals: manufacturer or trader — how to tell in India.

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Step 7: Run the red-flag and fraud-history pass

The last layer is behavioural and reputational. Independent of the paperwork, certain patterns repeat across almost every advance-payment scam:

• Pressure to pay quickly, "before the rate changes" or "before the slot is gone."
• A bank account in a name that does not match the verified legal name.
• A price meaningfully below the realistic market floor.
• Reluctance to do a video call, share the factory location, or get on a recorded line.
• Communication only through personal mobile numbers and free email, never a company domain.

It is also worth a plain web and news search of the company name and the bank account holder's name, alongside terms like "fraud" or "complaint." It is crude, but it surfaces prior victims more often than you would expect.

Go deeper here:

• advance payment fraud: supplier red flags in India
• fake supplier warning signs in India

When you want a single repeatable list to run before every new supplier, use the supplier due diligence checklist for India.

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Doing all of this in one pass: tools and automation

Done by hand, this is six or seven tabs — GST portal, DGFT, MCA, two or three B2B sites, a couple of search queries — and a fair bit of cross-checking names against each other. For one important supplier, that is time well spent. When you are screening ten suppliers for a single order, it gets tedious enough that people skip steps, which is exactly when things slip through.

That is the problem we built Vetrade to solve. You put in a GSTIN, IEC, or company name, and it pulls the checks together in roughly twenty seconds — GST and IEC status, MCA21 registration, the international layers (VIES and EORI for EU counterparties, plus sanctions screening), LinkedIn presence, and a scan for fraud-related news — then returns one consolidated read instead of seven open tabs. It is free to start, and it is meant to give you the same picture a careful analyst would assemble manually, faster and without skipped steps.

The point of the tool is not to replace your judgment. It is to make the boring, easy-to-skip parts automatic so your judgment is spent on the things that actually need it.

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What verification cannot tell you

Be honest with yourself about the limits, because over-trusting a "verified" result is its own kind of risk.

Verification confirms that a business is real, registered, and not obviously a fraud. It does not confirm that:

• The supplier can actually make your product to spec, on time, at the quoted quality.
• They have the capacity for your order volume.
• They will not have a bad batch, a labour problem, or a cash crunch next quarter.
• The bank account they message you today is the same one that is on file — account details are the easiest thing to swap at the last minute, so re-confirm them against the verified legal name every time, especially if they change.

Registration is the floor, not the ceiling. A genuinely registered company can still deliver a bad product, and a clean record from two years ago does not describe the business today. Verification gets you past the outright fraudsters; sample orders, references, escrow or LC terms, and a smaller first order get you the rest of the way on the suppliers that pass.

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The short version

If you remember nothing else, run this before the first payment:

1. Match the effort to the risk. Bigger advance, stranger relationship, custom order — more checking.
2. Verify the GSTIN on gst.gov.in and confirm the legal name matches the bank account.
3. Check the IEC on the DGFT portal if they export.
4. Confirm the company or LLP on MCA21 — and remember proprietorships will not appear.
5. Check the B2B footprint on IndiaMART, TradeIndia, JustDial, ExportersIndia, Alibaba.
6. Establish manufacturer vs trader so you know who you are really buying from.
7. Run the red-flag and fraud-news pass, and re-confirm bank details against the legal name.

Each step has its own deep-dive linked above, and the due diligence checklist collects it all in one place. The records are public, the checks are free, and twenty minutes up front is the cheapest insurance in this business.