1
A supplier that lets you buy at the exact 1688.com wholesale price with no platform markup layered on top. Rare in practice — most "1688 agent" services mark the item up anywhere from 10% to 80%. On SupplierSpy, a 1688-direct claim has to be verified with a published price comparison before it feeds the pricing-transparency dimension.
B
How much a supplier reveals about the company behind the product: legal entity, founding year, headquarters, leadership, audited financials. Public-market suppliers with an ISIN score highest; anonymous shell sites score lowest. Forms roughly 16% of the overall score.
C
D
A structured correction request for a specific score, fact row, or ranking position. Every dispute is tracked with a 14-day SLA and logged publicly once resolved, including the decision and the evidence that drove it.
A retail model where the seller never holds inventory. The customer orders from the seller, the seller forwards the order to an upstream supplier, and the supplier ships directly to the customer. The seller handles marketing and support; the supplier handles fulfillment.
A platform or catalog that fulfills individual retail orders on behalf of a reseller, typically with no minimum order quantity. Distinct from a manufacturer (who makes the product) and a wholesaler (who sells in bulk). A supplier may source from many manufacturers and repackage that inventory for single-unit shipping.
E
The delta (Δ) between a hand-typed editorial score and the score the rubric computes from published signals. SupplierSpy surfaces drift per supplier so readers can audit where human judgement is still in the loop — and where it should be tuned out.
I
International Securities Identification Number — the 12-character code that uniquely identifies a publicly traded security. A supplier with an ISIN can be looked up on any stock exchange, which is the strongest possible business-transparency signal. It anchors the upper bound of that dimension.
M
Minimum order quantity. Irrelevant for pure dropshipping — the whole point of dropshipping is MOQ of one. But MOQ matters enormously for wholesale, private-label, and bulk-buying workflows, so we note it where a supplier blurs the line.
P
The percentage a dropshipping platform adds to the upstream wholesale price before you see it. A product at $3.20 on 1688 that surfaces at $5.60 on a reseller dashboard carries a 75% platform markup. High markups with low transparency drag the pricing dimension down.
Whether the source-wholesale price and the platform markup are visible before you sign up or commit. A supplier that shows the 1688 price next to their listed price scores high. A supplier that hides cost behind a paid plan scores low. Worth 18% of the overall score.
R
The published scoring specification SupplierSpy uses. Every weight, every signal source, and every formula lives in the rubric document — open-licensed and versioned so a third party can re-compute any score from the raw inputs.
S
Any single public fact that feeds a rubric dimension: a Trustpilot rating, a Shopify App Store review count, a filed 10-K, a visible price page. Signals are collected every 6 hours and stored so each score can be reproduced from the exact inputs that produced it.
Service-level agreement. SupplierSpy commits to a 14-day outcome SLA on every dispute — we will publish a decision within 14 calendar days of a submission, even if the answer is "we need more evidence". Missed SLAs are logged on /changelog.
The actual upstream cost of an item, before any dropshipping platform markup. For a China-sourced product, this is typically the 1688 or Alibaba wholesale rate. Knowing it lets you see exactly how much margin the platform is taking.
Automated trigger that bypasses the 24-hour publish cadence. Any supplier that moves ≥2 positions in the ranking, or whose primary website goes up or down, flips the pipeline into instant-publish mode so the leaderboard never lags a real shift by more than a few minutes.
T
A weighted composite of pricing transparency and business transparency — roughly 34% of the overall SupplierSpy score. It is the single biggest lever in the rubric, on the theory that a supplier you cannot inspect is a supplier you cannot trust.