Your Sourcing Stack Is a Scammer’s Shopping List

Alibaba. 1688. Made-in-China. Two or three freight forwarder portals, Wise, Payoneer, your customs broker’s dashboard, WeChat Work, and a dozen supplier mailboxes. That’s the login list behind your imports, and every entry is a door someone out there wants open.

The importers we onboard typically juggle 35 to 50 separate accounts. Industry surveys keep finding that about two out of three people reuse the same password across multiple sites, and fraudsters love that habit. Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report attributes around 80% of web application breaches to stolen credentials. The FBI’s IC3 logged $2.9 billion in business email compromise losses in 2023 alone. The version you’ll meet most often in China trade? Someone hijacks your supplier’s mailbox and asks you to send the deposit to a “new” bank account.

So choosing between Dashlane Business, Free, and Family isn’t a consumer tech question. It’s a supply chain risk decision. Pick the wrong tier and you could lose a $20,000+ deposit over it.

Dashlane Free vs Family vs Business: Costs, Caps, and What Importers Actually Need

Dashlane Free: a 25-Password Test Drive

Dashlane Free caps you at 25 passwords on a single device. That ceiling hits mid-audit for most importers. Two supplier portals, one freight forwarder, a payment platform, and you’re out of room. Treat the free tier as a one-week evaluation tool, a way to learn the interface. It’s not protection for a live sourcing operation, and frankly, running real money through a setup that tight makes me nervous.

Dashlane Friends & Family: About $90 a Year for 10 Seats

At roughly $7.49 per month billed annually (about $89.99 per year at the time of writing), Dashlane Friends & Family covers up to 10 members. You get unlimited passwords, dark web monitoring, and a bundled VPN. For a solo importer working with one assistant or a partner, this is the value pick: full protection for under $8 a month across everyone who touches your accounts. In my experience, most solo operators never need anything more.

Dashlane Business: Around $6 per User per Month for Real Teams

Dashlane Business adds an admin console, shared Spaces, and provisioning controls. Here’s the feature that matters for sourcing teams. You can share the login to a supplier portal or a 1688 buying account with your purchasing assistant without ever revealing the actual password. They autofill it, but they can’t see it or export it. When that assistant moves on, you revoke access in one click instead of resetting 15 passwords at midnight. I’ve done the midnight version. Miserable.

Rule of thumb: if more than one person touches your supplier or payment accounts, and anyone has ever left (or will leave) your team, you need the admin controls in Business. The family plan won’t cut it.

Set Up Dashlane for a Sourcing Operation in Under an