Our buyers find us at trade shows. Does the site matter?

It matters most right after the trade show. The badge conversation gets them interested; the site is where they check whether you are worth a follow-up, usually that evening, usually on a phone, usually alongside two competitors they met the same day. That is the moment the site is actually working.

How much detail should we publish about products?

More than feels comfortable. Buyers are building a comparison, and a supplier who publishes grades, tolerances, packaging and lead times is easier to evaluate than one who asks them to enquire for details. If specific pricing is genuinely commercial, publish everything else and be clear about what needs a conversation.

Should the site be in our buyers' language?

If one market dominates, yes, and properly rather than machine-translated. If you sell into a dozen, English plus one is usually the right answer. A thin translation across many languages is worse than a strong site in fewer, and search engines treat it that way too.

What actually convinces a first-time buyer?

Being checkable. Company registration, a real address they can look up, named people with real roles, certificates as documents, and photographs of your actual operation. Every claim you make that can be independently verified is worth more than three that cannot.

B2B & trade3 min read

Websites for B2B, import and export businesses

Built to read as credible to a buyer in another country who has never heard of you and cannot visit.

Best for trading, distribution and industrial businesses whose buyers are deciding from a long way away.

A B2B trading site is doing something a consumer site never has to: convincing somebody several thousand miles away, who cannot visit, cannot inspect, and has been burned before, that you are a real company that will ship what it says it will ship.

Credibility comes before capability

Before a buyer cares what you can supply, they need to believe you exist as described. Registration details, a real address, named people, certifications, photographs of actual facilities rather than stock warehouses. Every one of those is worth more than another paragraph about commitment to quality.

The instinct is to sound large. The better instinct is to be checkable.

Specifications sell, adjectives do not

The person evaluating you is comparing specifications against two other suppliers in a spreadsheet. Grades, tolerances, packaging, minimum order, lead times, incoterms and what documentation ships with a consignment are the content. A site heavy on aspiration and light on numbers reads as a company that has not done this much.

The enquiry is the product

Traffic volume matters far less here than on a consumer site, because one qualified enquiry can be worth a year of it. That changes where the effort goes: a short, specific enquiry form that captures product, volume and destination, routed to somebody who will answer within a working day in the buyer's timezone rather than yours.

Registration, address and named contacts, findable without hunting
Certifications shown as documents rather than described as claims
Product pages carrying the specifications a buyer will put in a spreadsheet
An enquiry form asking product, volume and destination and very little else
A language version for the market you actually sell into, if there is one

The instinct is to sound large. The better instinct is to be checkable.

What a build here actually includes

Every build is scoped to the practice, but on this kind of site these are the parts that are not optional.

A credibility layer that is verifiable: registration, address, people, certifications as documents
Product or capability pages built around specifications rather than adjectives
A short enquiry form capturing product, volume and destination, and routed to a person
Photography of the real operation, because stock warehouses are recognised instantly
A second language where the buying market justifies one, done properly

What we keep seeing go wrong

None of these are hypothetical. They are the things that turn up again and again on sites in this vertical, and most of them are cheap to avoid and expensive to undo.

Pages of commitment-to-quality copy with no specification anywhere
Certifications mentioned in prose but never shown
A contact form that asks for a message and nothing structured
Stock imagery of warehouses that belong to nobody
Enquiries landing in an inbox that is asleep when the buyer is awake

Questions we get asked first

Our buyers find us at trade shows. Does the site matter?: It matters most right after the trade show. The badge conversation gets them interested; the site is where they check whether you are worth a follow-up, usually that evening, usually on a phone, usually alongside two competitors they met the same day. That is the moment the site is actually working.
How much detail should we publish about products?: More than feels comfortable. Buyers are building a comparison, and a supplier who publishes grades, tolerances, packaging and lead times is easier to evaluate than one who asks them to enquire for details. If specific pricing is genuinely commercial, publish everything else and be clear about what needs a conversation.
Should the site be in our buyers' language?: If one market dominates, yes, and properly rather than machine-translated. If you sell into a dozen, English plus one is usually the right answer. A thin translation across many languages is worse than a strong site in fewer, and search engines treat it that way too.
What actually convinces a first-time buyer?: Being checkable. Company registration, a real address they can look up, named people with real roles, certificates as documents, and photographs of your actual operation. Every claim you make that can be independently verified is worth more than three that cannot.