🇿🇦How to verify a supplier in South Africa

Registry

CIPC (Companies and Intellectual Property Commission)

Company ID

registration number, formatted YYYY/NNNNNN/NN (year of incorporation first)

Cost

Online lookup

Active status

The status field must read "In Business". A company shown as "Deregistration process" or "Final deregistered" has stopped filing its annual returns and legally may not trade.

• The registry search itself is NOT free-and-open: CIPC eServices (and its newer BizPortal front, bizportal.gov.za) require creating an account, and the full disclosure certificate is a paid per-enquiry document. There is no free anonymous company search for South Africa, which is itself worth knowing: any site offering one is reselling CIPC data of unknown freshness.
• The one genuinely free, no-login official check is the SARS VAT Vendor Search (secure.sarsefiling.co.za/vatvendorsearch.aspx): enter the 10-digit VAT number (South African VAT numbers always start with 4) or the registered trading name, and SARS confirms whether the vendor is VAT-registered. The database is updated weekly. A manufacturer trading at any real scale is VAT-registered, so a name that returns nothing here deserves questions.
• Certifications: SANS product-safety marks (e.g. SANS 1828 for food-contact cleaners) are issued by certification bodies like SABS or SATAS, and the certificate number can be confirmed with the issuing body directly. Ask the supplier which body issued the mark and check the number with that body, not with a copy of the certificate.

Before you sign: five asks no registry can answer

The register proves the company exists and who signs. It says nothing about whether the supplier survives a bad quarter, a fire or a key person leaving. Serious suppliers answer these five asks without friction; hesitation on any of them is information too.

• Business continuity: what happens to your order if their plant loses power, a strike hits or their systems go down? Ask for the plan, not a reassurance.
• Liability insurance: is product or professional liability insured, with which insurer and to what ceiling? A certificate of insurance is a one-page email for a real firm.
• Exit terms: how do you terminate if it goes wrong, what notice and fees apply, and how do you get your tooling, molds or data back?
• Support in numbers: ask for response and resolution times as figures, not adjectives. A supplier who commits to hours in writing has a support process; one who writes fast support does not.
• Named people: who exactly runs production and who owns your account? Continuity of a named team matters more than a polished sales deck, and employee-review sites often show whether that team stays.

General commercial hygiene, not legal advice.