Manufacturer Website Checklist: What Export Buyers Look For

An overseas buyer who has never met you will decide in a few minutes whether you are worth an email. They will not visit your factory first. They will open your website.

If the site is slow, vague or hard to use, they close the tab and move on to the next supplier on their list. If it answers their questions quickly, they write to you.

This checklist covers the 12 things buyers look for. Use it to review your own website today. Each point is simple to check, and most are simple to fix.

1. Say what you make and where you ship, right on the home page

A buyer should understand your business in five seconds. Your home page needs a clear headline about what you make, a line about who you sell to (for example, “Exporting to 40 countries”), and a button to see products or get in touch.

Avoid vague lines like “Excellence in everything we do”. Say “Vitrified tiles and porcelain slabs for export” instead.

2. Make your product range easy to browse

Buyers compare many suppliers. If they cannot find the right product quickly, they leave. Group products into clear categories, and add filters for the things that matter in your industry, such as size, finish, material or application.

Skyrun Ceramica and Sunworld Tiles are good examples. Both are built around a clear product catalogue, so a buyer can go from the home page to a specific product in two clicks.

3. Give every product its own page with real specifications

A product photo and a name are not enough. Each product page should list the details a buyer needs to decide:

• Sizes, materials, finishes and colours
• Technical specifications and standards
• Packing details and minimum order quantity (MOQ)
• A clear button to ask for a price or a sample

Specification tables also help search engines understand your products, which brings more of the right visitors.

4. Show your certifications and standards

If you hold ISO certification, CE marking, test reports or other approvals, show them clearly, ideally with a small logo row near the top of the page and the full details on a separate page. Only list approvals you actually hold. Buyers do check.

5. Prove that you can deliver

Buyers worry about one thing more than price: will this supplier deliver on time, every time? Put proof on your site:

• Photos or a short video of your factory and production line
• Your production capacity and main machinery
• The countries you export to
• Clear information about quality checks and packing

Real photos work much better than stock images.

6. Make it easy to contact you

Offer more than one way to get in touch: a short enquiry form, WhatsApp, a phone number with the country code, and an email address. Keep the form short. Name, email and message are enough. Every extra field loses some enquiries.

Also tell buyers when to expect an answer, for example “We reply within 24 hours”. Then do it.

7. Check that the site loads fast

Many of your buyers will open your site on a mobile phone and a slow connection, often in another country. A site that takes more than a few seconds to load loses a large share of visitors before they see anything.

The biggest causes are oversized photos and heavy templates. Compress images, use modern formats like WebP, and avoid loading things you do not need. You can test your speed for free on PageSpeed Insights.

8. Offer downloadable catalogues and spec sheets

Buyers often need to share your details with colleagues, so a downloadable catalogue is useful. Offer a PDF catalogue as well as your online one. Our article on web catalogues vs PDF catalogues explains how to use both.

9. Use a company email address and show real contact details

An email like [email protected] makes a business look less established than [email protected]. Use an address on your own domain. Show your full address, phone number and company name in the footer and on a contact page. Buyers use these details to check that you are a real company.

10. Make sure it works well on mobile

Open your site on your own phone and try to find a product and send an enquiry. Can you read the text without zooming? Are the buttons easy to tap? Do the tables fit the screen? If any of these fail, fix them first, because most visitors will see your site on a phone.

11. Add trust signals: clients, reviews and markets

A row of client logos, a few honest testimonials and a list of countries you export to all lower the buyer’s risk. If you have a client who is happy to be named, ask for a short quote. Real names and companies are far more convincing than anonymous praise.

12. Cover the basics: HTTPS, working links and fresh content

Small errors make a company look careless:

• The browser shows “Not secure” because there is no HTTPS
• Links that lead to error pages
• A copyright year from several years ago
• A news section whose last post is from 2019
• No privacy policy, even though you have an enquiry form

Fixing these takes little time and removes quiet reasons for buyers to doubt you.

A quick test you can do today

Ask a friend or contact who has never seen your website to do three things on their phone: find one product’s size and material, find your phone number, and send you an enquiry. Do not help them. Watch where they get stuck. Those are your most important fixes.

Where to start

You do not need to fix all 12 points at once. Start with the items that cost the least and help the most: a clear home page headline (1), real specifications (3), a short enquiry form (6) and a speed check (7).

If you would like a second opinion, we review manufacturers’ websites and tell you what to fix first. See our website design and development services, or send us your website and we will take a look.