How we score,
and what we refuse to.
Every profile on FactoryBase is assembled from public evidence, not from what a factory says about itself. This page is the whole method: where the data comes from, what we measure, what we score — and the one thing we will never do.
We score the website a factory built. We never score the factory itself. And no score is for sale.
Public evidence,
sourced and dated.
Machine-collected
Profiles are built from official sites, marketplace stores, fair listings and registry pages — collected by script, never self-submitted by the company.
Sourced & timestamped
Every field carries where it came from and when we last fetched it. You see a “SOURCE … · LAST SWEEP …” line on every profile.
Claimed ≠ verified
Anything a company states about itself is labelled claimed and shown next to the check. A claimed headcount and the social-insurance figure sit side by side.
What gets a number,
and what never does.
Everything numeric on this site falls into one of four kinds, and each is held to its own rule:
| TYPE | EXAMPLE | RULE |
|---|---|---|
| Facts | Headcount on the social-insurance record, penalties, year founded | Shown exactly as found, with a source link and a date. Never enters any score. |
| Measurements | RFQ first-response time, email deliverability | A single standardised test. Method is published and the result is dated. |
| Computed metric | Website Score | A deterministic, open algorithm. Whole pool re-run the same day. A free path to improve is always documented. |
| Badges | Verified · Site-Verified | Binary. Backed by a repeatable check, dated, and refusable. Not an opinion — a checkable statement of fact. |
We never publish a company score.
No composite “supplier score”, no trust score, no credit rating, no A/B/C grade — ever. Rolling penalties, headcount and export history into a single verdict is an editorial judgement dressed up as objectivity, and it is the exact lever a pay-to-play platform pulls. We score the website a factory built — a fixable object, the way PageSpeed and SSL Labs score any site on the web. We never sit in judgement of the company.
Verified means
someone checked.
A Verified badge is not a compliment — it is a record that five remote checks were run and passed, each with a date and evidence behind it:
- 01Factory or trader
Cross-checking the business scope, related entities and premises against the "manufacturer" claim.
- 02Export records
US customs bills of lading — real shipments, real destinations, real dates.
- 03Certificate registry
ISO / certificate numbers checked against the IAF registry, not taken from a PDF on the website.
- 04RFQ response test
A mystery-buyer enquiry, scored for speed, English and quote completeness.
- 05Digital consistency
Do the website, marketplace stores and registry tell the same story?
Factories pay for the audit — the work of running these checks — never for the outcome. A factory can fail, and a factory can be refused; the fee is returned and the badge is not granted. Fact badges (a verified email, a registered certificate number) light up automatically and cost nothing.
Wrong? Tell us.
Because every fact carries a source and a date, it can be checked — and corrected. Send us the evidence and we fix it. You can ask us to remove your contact details, or the whole profile. Negative facts are never hidden or deleted in exchange for money, and correcting or removing a fact is always free.
Our conflict of interest,
stated plainly.
We also design and build websites — that is how this project funds itself, and it means we have a commercial interest in the same Website Score you see here. So the score is built to be impossible for us to rig:
- ›The algorithm and every check it runs are public — anyone can reproduce the same grade.
- ›Weights change only through a public changelog, with the whole pool recomputed on the same day.
- ›No score can be bought, raised, or lowered by paying us. There is no manual override — not even for us.
- ›A customer whose site we rebuild will see its score rise, for the same reason anyone else’s would: the site genuinely got better.
SCORES ARE NEVER FOR SALE · WEBSITE SCORE IS ALGORITHMIC AND REPRODUCIBLE · NEGATIVE FACTS ARE NEVER REMOVED FOR PAYMENT