What Documents a Game-Key Supplier Must Provide

The difference between a legitimate wholesaler and a grey channel shows up not in the price list but in the paperwork they hand over without being chased. The document pack does two jobs: it evidences that the codes were obtained lawfully, and it gives you legal standing to claim compensation when keys get revoked. Below is the concrete checklist to send a new supplier before the first payment leaves your account.

Company registration documents

The first block answers a simple question — who am I actually dealing with?

• Certificate of incorporation or registry extract — jurisdiction, registration number, incorporation date, current status.
• Registered address and beneficial owner or director details. A company incorporated three weeks ago at a mass-registration address is not automatically fraudulent, but it changes how big a first trade should be.
• Tax number — VAT registration or the local equivalent.
• Bank details in the name of the same company. This is critical: if the contract is with entity A but payment is requested to an individual's account B, there is no legal link between your money and the contractual obligations.

Check the registration number against the public registry of the country of incorporation. It takes five minutes and eliminates a meaningful share of candidates.

Contract or public offer

Plenty of wholesalers operate on a public offer rather than a signed contract, and that is fine — what matters is what it says. Non-negotiable clauses:

• Subject matter and delivery mechanics — what is sold (activation codes), how it is delivered, at what point it counts as delivered.
• Rights and provenance warranty. The supplier confirms it is entitled to distribute the codes and that they were lawfully acquired.
• Replacement policy and warranty window. What happens to a dead or revoked code, how long you have to raise it, and how long the supplier has to resolve it.
• Payment terms — prepayment, deposit, credit terms, currency, who bears transfer fees.
• Governing law and dispute process. The clause nobody reads until it is the only clause that matters.

Pay particular attention to the response window on claims. "Within a reasonable time" means, in practice, no obligation at all.

Invoices and delivery evidence

For every consignment you should end up holding:

• An invoice with seller details, SKU list, quantity, price and currency.
• Delivery evidence — a code export, a dashboard report or an API order log with order identifiers.
• Proof of payment where the recipient matches the seller on the invoice.

That triad — invoice, delivery, payment — is exactly what you present to a marketplace or in a dispute. If delivery runs through an API, retain the API responses along with your idempotency keys.

Source-of-goods declaration

This is the most contested item, and it helps to be realistic about it. Nobody will show you the full chain from publisher to your account — supplier composition is commercially sensitive. But you are entitled to ask for:

• A written source statement — publisher, official distributor, or a named wholesaler.
• A warranty of lawful acquisition free of encumbrances.
• Authorisation evidence if the supplier calls itself an official distributor of a specific line.
• Declared key region, which is decisive both for resale and for where you are permitted to sell those codes.

A written statement does not guarantee codes will never be revoked. It guarantees that when they are, you have a document to point at.

Replacement policy for revoked codes

This deserves its own section because it is where money is actually lost. A serious policy defines four parameters:

Read the exclusions row carefully — it determines the real value of the guarantee. A warranty that excludes publisher-side revocation does not cover the main risk. More detail in handling code revocation and region locks.

Tax documents and record-keeping

VAT treatment of cross-border digital supplies differs by jurisdiction and changes regularly — always confirm the applicable regime and rate with your accountant and current local legislation. What you need from the supplier regardless: properly issued invoices carrying tax identifiers, a clear statement of whether tax is included in the price, and a willingness to issue documents in a form your bookkeeping can accept. The underlying mechanics are covered in VAT and tax for digital goods distributors.

Why marketplaces demand this pack

Marketplaces carry liability both to the buyer and to the rights holder. If a rights holder reports an illegitimate channel, the platform must be able to show it requested proof of rights from the seller. So during moderation of digital listings, platforms request supplier contracts, purchase invoices and sometimes a trademark usage letter. Without the pack, the listing is removed; repeat incidents lead to account restrictions. Platform-specific practice is in the guides for selling digital goods on Ozon and on Wildberries.

Common excuses and what they actually mean

You will hear the same handful of deflections. It helps to know what each one signals.

"We work on trust, our clients never ask for this." Established wholesalers get asked constantly and have the pack ready as a PDF. The sentence describes a supplier whose existing clients do not have recourse either.

"Provenance is confidential." Partially true — the specific upstream may be commercially sensitive. But a warranty of lawful acquisition and a declared key region are not confidential, and refusing both is a refusal of liability.

"Pay this personal account, the company account is under review." The most expensive sentence in the industry. Payment to an individual severs the link between your money and the contract; there is nothing to enforce afterwards.

"Replacement is handled case by case." No claim window, no response time, no defined compensation. In practice this means replacement happens when it is convenient for the supplier.

"We can invoice, but it costs extra." An invoice is not a service — it is the normal consequence of a sale by a registered entity. Charging for one indicates the sale is not being booked.

None of these is automatically fatal on its own, but each should shrink the size of your first trade.

The checklist to send a new supplier

Email this before the first prepayment:

1. Registry extract or certificate of incorporation.
2. Tax number and registered address.
3. Bank details in the name of the same entity.
4. Contract or offer including replacement policy and response window.
5. A sample invoice.
6. Source-of-goods declaration and declared key region.
7. Payment terms — prepayment, deposit, credit.
8. Escalation contact with working hours and time zone.

Sound practice is to keep the first trade small even when every document checks out. Additional verification steps are collected in the gift-card supplier verification checklist.

Where to source without the paperwork overhead

Document management is a major reason sellers consolidate onto a wholesale aggregator. FoxReload covers 900+ SKUs — game keys, gift cards, top-ups, eSIM and software licences — under one contract and one document set: invoices from a single entity, a single replacement policy for non-working codes, order exports through a REST API for reconciliation. Instead of ten document packs from ten sources you keep one that survives marketplace moderation. How the supply tiers fit together is explained in distributor vs supplier vs aggregator.