A buyer sourcing a component, a raw material or a private-label run does not decide to contact you. They decide to eliminate you. Shortlisting is subtraction: they open eight supplier sites, cut it to three, and only then does anyone write an email.
That elimination happens in a couple of minutes per site, against a checklist nobody ever writes down. Here it is written down. Score your own site out of nine — one point each, no partial credit, and be harsh.
The nine
- Specifications you can read without asking. Grades, sizes, tolerances, materials, finishes — in a table on the page. Not "wide range available". Not a PDF behind a form. A buyer who has to email you to find out whether you make the size they need will email the supplier who already told them.
- Photographs of your actual plant. Your floor, your machines, your dispatch area, your people. Stock images of a generic factory are recognised instantly and they read as concealment. A slightly untidy real photograph beats a perfect fake one every time.
- Certifications with numbers. ISO, BIS, CE, FDA, GMP, whatever applies — with the certificate number, the issuing body and the validity. A logo alone is decoration. A number is checkable, and buyers do check.
- Capacity, stated plainly. Units or tonnes per month, number of lines, shifts. The unspoken fear in every sourcing decision is that the supplier cannot hold the volume once the order grows. Answer it before it is asked.
- MOQ, lead time and packing. The three questions that come in the first email anyway. Publishing them costs you the enquiries you would have lost at the quotation stage and saves your team the rest.
- A named human with a direct line. Not info@. A person, a designation, a mobile number, an email. B2B is bought from people, and "contact us" is a way of saying there is nobody in particular here.
- Evidence you have done this before. Sectors served, application examples, the kind of customer you supply. If client names are confidential, describe the work without them — "we supply three tier-one automotive suppliers" is usable and true.
- Export readiness, if you export. Ports you ship from, documentation you handle, countries you have supplied, Incoterms you work on. An overseas buyer is assessing risk, not price.
- A downloadable catalogue or spec sheet. Because the person shortlisting you is rarely the person deciding. They need something to forward, and if you do not give them a file, they forward a competitor’s.
If you scored under five
You are almost certainly still getting enquiries, and that is exactly what makes this hard to see. The enquiries you get are not the measure. The buyers who eliminated you never wrote, so the failure produces no evidence at all — the funnel looks fine right up until you compare it to a competitor with the same product and a better-documented site.
The two that matter most
If you can only fix two, fix specifications and the named human. Specifications get you onto the shortlist, because they let a buyer confirm you can make the thing. A named human gets you the email, because someone has to be worth writing to.
Everything else on the list is a tiebreaker. Those two are the gate.