A European buyer who lands on your site has usually been given a task: find a supplier for a product, and be able to justify the choice later. The risk is personal. If the supplier fails, the buyer explains why they picked it. So the site is not read like a brochure. It is read like a file, by someone looking for facts they can check and for anything that would be embarrassing to have missed.
The first check: does this company exist, and who is it
The legal name, the registered address and the registration number of the entity that will sign the contract and issue the invoice. They should be identical on the site, on the quotation and on the bank details. A name on the site that differs from the name on the quotation reads as two companies, and the buyer will ask which one they are dealing with. Since the buyer usually cannot read the company register in Chinese, give the registered name both in characters and in the Latin-letter form that appears on your official documents, together with the register number.
- Named people. A name, a function, a way to reach them, ideally a real photograph. A site where nobody is named is a site where nobody answers for anything.
- Real premises. Photographs of your own production line, warehouse and test bench, taken by you, showing work in progress rather than an empty hall.
- Documents without a form. Datasheets, manuals in the buyer's language and conformity documentation that can be opened without leaving an email address.
- Certificates you hold, with their details. Number, issuing body, scope and the file itself. A certificate that can be verified counts. A logo does not.
- Terms in writing. The price basis, the delivery terms, the warranty, the returns route and who handles a problem in Europe.
- A professional email address. On a domain that belongs to the company, not on a free webmail service.
Evidence that costs nothing and is rarely given
Limits are a signal. A page that says what you do not do, the minimum order you accept, the products you do not make, the markets you do not serve, tells the buyer that someone has thought about the business. A short page explaining how a quotation works, what it contains and what it depends on, does more than a paragraph of promises. Chinese sites often avoid limits for fear of losing an enquiry. A European buyer reads the absence of limits as the absence of a process.
| Signal | What the buyer does with it | What makes them leave |
|---|---|---|
| Company identity | Compares the name with the register, the quotation and the bank details. | Different names in different places, or no registration number at all. |
| Certificates | Opens the file and checks the number, the issuer and the scope. | Logos with no document behind them, or a mark shown on a product it does not cover. |
| Photographs | Looks for the same place in several pictures. | Stock images, a building that appears on other suppliers' sites, a showroom presented as a factory. |
| References | Looks for a name or a company they could call. | Anonymous logos, « trusted by leading brands », testimonials with no name. |
| Language | Reads the product page as a technical document. | Machine translation that changes the meaning of a specification, or two languages mixed on one page. |
| Contact | Tries it. | A form that never confirms, a personal webmail address, a phone number with no country code. |
What makes a buyer leave quickly
Superlatives come first. « Best quality, lowest price, number one » tells the buyer nothing they can check, and it is the language they associate with the suppliers they have learned to avoid. Then come countdown timers, pop-ups that cover the page, and a chat window that opens by itself. Then missing legal pages, no statement of who the seller is, and a form that asks for a phone number and a budget before showing a single price basis. An account to create before seeing anything is another door. A European buyer reads emphasis as a lack of content, and the page they read most closely is the one without any.
Certifications: show only what you can prove
The conformity marking on a product is not a badge obtained from a website. In many product families it is the manufacturer's own declaration, backed by a technical file. In others a third-party body takes part. Either way there is a document behind it, and an importer, a customs officer or a market-surveillance authority can ask for it. A mark displayed without the document is easy to check and costly if it turns out to be unsupported, because a false claim of conformity is not a marketing detail. A test report that names the laboratory and the standard is worth more than the logo. Never show a certificate that belongs to a supplier you buy from as if it were yours.
A checklist to run on your own site
- Open the site in a private window, as a stranger. Write down who the company is, where it is and how to reach a person. If you have to hunt for any of the three, so does the buyer.
- Make the legal name, address and registration number identical on the site, the quotation, the invoice and the bank details.
- Replace every stock photograph with a real one, or remove it.
- Remove every certificate you cannot attach a document to. Add the number and the issuer to the ones you keep.
- Put datasheets, conformity documentation and terms where they can be opened without a form.
- Have a native reader of the target language go through the product pages, looking only for errors in specifications.
- Delete the superlatives. Replace each with the fact it was standing in for, or with nothing.
Ask someone who buys for a living, a customer or a contact outside your business, to spend a few minutes on the site and say aloud what they cannot find. Do not ask whether it looks good. Write down every sentence that begins « where is… » or « who is… ». That list is the work to do, and it is usually shorter and cheaper than a redesign.