One platform tells you who the company is. The other tells you what it can make. I measured.

1. Platform subject fields: the numbers

The last three rows are the reason this study distinguishes three states rather than two. On 1688 the code field exists on every profile and eight suppliers simply left it empty. That is a supplier behaviour. On Alibaba.com there is nothing to leave empty: regCode, legalRep and regCapital do not appear anywhere in the page source. That is a platform decision, and only the three-state reading tells them apart.

2. The badge verifies the factory, not the entity

A reasonable objection is that paid or independently assessed suppliers might carry more identity fields. They did not in this frame. Our Alibaba.com sample spans nine combinations of assessor and tier: SGS, TÜV Rheinland and no assessor at all; a “Verified” supplier badge, a “Verified” factory badge, and no badge. All 33 are identical on these fields.

What the assessed profiles do carry is substantial and worth reading: floor area, annual export revenue, R&D and QC headcount, certification numbers, on-time delivery, order counts. One profile in our sample published US$6,510,025 in annual exports and a 1,364 m² building. That is a real assessment of a factory. It does not answer which registered company will sign your contract and receive your money. A buyer who reads the badge as covering both has been given no reason on the page to think otherwise.

3. What this means at a desk

If you are sourcing on 1688, the entity data is already in front of you. It is on the factory card, and on the profiles we sampled it was served to a logged-out request from outside China. Most buyers never look, because nothing on the page suggests the 18 characters matter.

If you are sourcing on Alibaba.com, you hold an English trading name and nothing else. That lines up with what we measured separately: an English name alone produced a candidate for 57.5% of 106 companies and an end-to-end confirmable match for 44.3%. Roughly three in five suppliers cannot be resolved from what the international profile gives you.

Ask the supplier for the business licence. The registered name and 18-character code are both printed on it, and the check digit can be validated offline before you pay anyone.

4. Method, and what this study cannot say

Six product categories chosen before collection and not changed afterwards: phone cases, copper alloy, LED lighting, knitted fabric, stainless-steel kitchenware and plastic packaging. Suppliers were taken in the order the site search returned them, without selection. On Alibaba.com we read the first five per category; on 1688, the first ten. Two 1688 shops whose profile identifier could not be read are recorded as exclusions rather than dropped silently.

Field presence was read from the page source and scored in three states: present, empty, absent. The difference between “this supplier left it blank” and “the platform has no such field” is the whole finding. Every 18-character candidate had to satisfy both the GB 32100-2015 check digit and a six-digit administrative-division segment. That second test is not decoration: one Alibaba.com page carried a hexadecimal string that passed the check digit by chance, which a check-digit-only method would have counted as a real code.

What it cannot say

• It is not a count of every supplier. 94 profiles across six categories on one day. Platform layouts change; the date on this study is load-bearing.
• The 1688 figure is an optimistic bound. Only suppliers with a factory card can be sampled this way, and suppliers without one are plausibly the ones carrying less.
• It says nothing about whether the data is correct. The 1688 block is a third-party verified snapshot with its own pass date. We measured whether the page gives you the fields, not whether the values are true or current.
• It does not evaluate the badges. We counted fields. Whether an SGS or TÜV assessment is thorough is a different question and not one this method touches.
• It is not reproducible unattended. Both platforms interrupted collection with slider challenges, which a person cleared by hand. We do not solve challenges automatically, and anyone repeating this will need to clear them too.

Questions about this study

Citing this study

You may quote or reproduce these figures, including commercially, provided the measurement date, the frame and the stated limits travel with them. One row per profile, with the three-state reading and the check result for every code candidate, is in the data file (JSON).

Archived copies, each with its own DOI, resolving independently of this site: Zenodo · Harvard Dataverse.

A citation with everything it needs:

Currawong, “One platform tells you who the company is, the other tells you what it can make”, subject-identity fields read from 94 supplier profiles across Alibaba.com and 1688 in six product categories, 28 August 2026. https://currawongweb.com/verify/alibaba-1688-transparency-study/ Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22136065

@dataset{currawong_platform_subject_fields_2026,
  author    = {Bao L. Zhou},
  title     = {{Subject-identity fields on Chinese supplier profiles: Alibaba.com and 1688 compared (94 profiles, August 2026)}},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.22136065},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22136065}
}

This study reports field presence, not a service claim. Currawong verifies public records on request and states sources, query dates and limits with every result; it does not certify suppliers.