A foreign supplier usually imagines a Chinese buyer discovering them at a trade fair and then emailing. That does happen, and it is the smallest part. Most of the journey is invisible: a name heard somewhere, a search, a look at what exists about you in Chinese, a question asked inside a professional group, and only then a first contact from someone who has already half decided.
The four stages, and what each one needs from you
- Hearing the name. From a peer, a distributor, an industry event, an article. You cannot buy this directly; you can only be the kind of supplier people mention.
- Searching. In Chinese, on a Chinese search engine, often from a phone. If nothing exists about you in Chinese, the journey ends here and you never know it happened.
- Checking. Does the company look real, established and reachable? Is there a person, a registration, a case they recognise? This is where most foreign suppliers lose without a trace.
- Asking around. In a professional group chat, among people in the same sector. This conversation decides a great deal and you will never see it.
What this implies about where to spend
- Content in Chinese that answers the questions of stage 2 and 3 does more work than advertising, because it is what exists when someone looks.
- A reachable, named human matters more than a polished brochure: stage 3 is about whether you are real.
- Anything a buyer can forward — a specification sheet, a short document, a price logic — travels into stage 4, where you are absent.
- Speed of first reply is a stage-4 argument: « they answered the same day » is a sentence someone says about you in a group.
The asymmetry worth acting on: you cannot influence stages 1 and 4 directly, but everything you publish in Chinese is what feeds them. That is the argument for content over campaigns in a B2B category.