As ICP certificate (ICP证) is described as a license required for websites conducting commercial operations and collecting payment online (e.g., eCommerce website). Many of our client is confused if it is ok to use ICP filling for their eCommerce website.
ICP certificate was known as it requires a lot of documents which including some staff’s social insurance report. However, it is not the reason stops your company to obtain an ICP certificate. It is because ICP certificate is not available to exclusively foreign-owned enterprise at all. If more than 49% of capital are foreign investment, they can’t apply for ICP certificate.
We have mentioned before all of our client are using ICP filling without problem. And 90% of Chinese eCommerce websites don’t have ICP certificate too:
However, some of the media company starts to asking for it to setup a service, e.g. wechat application. Then EDI is the alternative.
The purpose of EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is similar to ICP certificate, and the requirement are similar.
- business license
- legal representative’s passport
- internet and information security plan
- IT’s ID card/ passport
- Domain certificate: so it has to be registered through a Chinese registrar which is the basic requirement for ICP filling too.
- hosting server order
- ISP certificate
And some other reports. We will need you to provide a local contact to help us collecting all the documents. Since it is very difficult for a foreigner to understand what is it. It is difficult for us to describe in English as well.
In the end, we would suggest to register ICP filling instead of EDI or ICP certificate. It would allow you to do most of online activities in China now. Unless it is required by any service provider.