Background

The customer is a cross-border e-commerce platform. Its recruitment team develops factory sellers, meaning sellers with their own production capacity. Recruitment is organised by product category, with teams based in major manufacturing cities.

Problems in seller recruitment

  • Leads mix factories with trading companies, and the two are hard to tell apart from company names and registered business scope.
  • Because recruitment runs by category, the team needs to know where factories of a given category are concentrated, in order to plan field recruitment and industry events.
  • The recruitment system needs to verify a company when a lead is entered. Manual lookups are slow and the results are not retained.

The approach

Screening exporting factories. The export-business flag is combined with main products and the four-level industry classification to list factories in a category that have export business. Insured headcount and registered capital can be filtered by range to separate companies by size.

Planning recruitment by cluster. Industrial clusters overlaid on province, city and county divisions show how concentrated a category is by region. The team uses this to choose cities for field recruitment and venues for industry events.

API integration. The platform calls factory search, factory detail and deep-dive capabilities through the open platform's REST API and MCP service. When a lead is entered, the recruitment system looks the company up by name to see whether it is in the factory database, and receives main products, size and credential tags for the recruiter to assess.

Screening by credentials. National "Little Giant" specialised SMEs, manufacturing single-product champions, CEC environmental certification and management-system certifications are provided as structured tags and can be used to select priority sellers.

How it is used

The team generates target lists by category and assigns them to city groups. Exported records are flagged in later searches and can be filtered out, which avoids repeated contact. API usage is metered per application, and the platform's engineering team manages keys and usage in the console.

Where it applies

The same approach suits platform businesses that need to identify and verify Chinese factories at scale, including cross-border e-commerce, industrial e-commerce and supply-chain service platforms.

The company name is withheld and no customer operating data is disclosed.