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China digital

Where Chinese B2B enquiries actually come from

Not from a contact form. The sequence is almost always the same, it runs through a person rather than a company, and the website's job is smaller and more specific than you think.

France → China

European companies build a Chinese site with a contact form and wait. The form stays empty, and the conclusion drawn is that there is no demand. The demand is there; it simply does not arrive that way.

The sequence, as it actually runs

  1. Someone encounters you — a forwarded article, a trade show, an industry group, a search.
  2. They check you, quietly. Your site, your Chinese-language presence, whether you look like you will still exist next year. You will never know this happened.
  3. They add a person on WeChat — not a company account. Usually someone whose name they have seen attached to something useful.
  4. A conversation runs for weeks or months, in short exchanges, with long silences that mean nothing.
  5. A meeting happens, and only then does anything resembling a formal enquiry exist.

Steps two and three are the whole game. Step two is what your website is for: not to generate the enquiry but to survive the check. Step three is why a company account with no human face generates nothing.

What this means for what you build

  • Put named people forward, with a role and a face. A company that is only a logo cannot be added on WeChat, and therefore cannot start step three.
  • Make the site fast and credible in Chinese, then stop optimising it for conversion. It is a reference check, not a funnel.
  • Publish things worth forwarding. Forwarding is the distribution mechanism; an article nobody sends to a colleague reaches nobody.
  • Answer quickly and in short messages. A three-paragraph email reply to a two-line WeChat message reads as distance.

The measurement problem, said honestly

Almost none of this is attributable. The article that caused the enquiry was read six months earlier and forwarded twice. If you evaluate Chinese market development on last-click attribution you will conclude that nothing works and switch it off shortly before it starts working. Judge it on conversations started and conversations still alive, and give it considerably longer than a European campaign.

The practical consequence for a small European company: one person who is genuinely present in Chinese, consistently, outperforms a larger budget spread across channels. This is a channel where presence compounds and spending does not.

Questions we get on this.

Why does nobody fill in my Chinese contact form?

Because the conversation normally starts by adding a person on WeChat, not by submitting a form to a company. Put a named person and a QR code where the form is, and keep the form as a secondary option.

Keep reading on this.

China marketHow a Chinese B2B buyer finds you, checks you and decidesThe path runs through platforms, a search engine and a group chat you cannot see. Knowing its shape tells you where your effort is worth spending.China digitalThe WeChat official account: what it is actually for in B2BMost European companies open one, publish three articles, and abandon it. The mistake is treating it as a publishing channel — in B2B its value is identity and contact.China digitalThe trust signals a Chinese buyer looks forThey are not the same signals a European buyer looks for, and they appear earlier in the decision. Most European sites put them last, or nowhere.China digitalZhihu and Bilibili: where Chinese technical opinion is actually formedForeign companies build a WeChat account, sometimes a Xiaohongshu account, and stop there. The two places where a Chinese engineer or a technical buyer goes to find out whether something is any good are almost never on the list.

If this raised a question about your own project, tell us where you are — the first conversation usually clarifies more than a proposal.

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