Building an export website for windows and doors

1. What buyers are looking for

This is a high-value, made-to-order purchase. Before sending an inquiry, a buyer typically looks for four kinds of information. Miss any one and the inquiry can stall.

1. 1Installed work: real installations, used to judge whether you've done anything like their project. This is looked at first.
2. 2Products and ranges: opening types, how ranges are divided, achievable sizes — so they can match it against their requirement.
3. 3Craft and materials: profile sections, hardware, sealing and thermal treatment. Professional buyers read your standard from these.
4. 4Drawings and specifications: node drawings, dimensions and technical parameters — the step that turns an inquiry into a quote.

2. Organizing product pages

The most common mistake is organizing product pages around internal item codes. Buyers don't know your codes. They know what kind of window they want.

Three better organizing principles, which can be layered:

• By opening type — casement, sliding, folding, lift-and-slide, tilt-and-turn. This is how buyers search.
• By range — different profile systems and performance positions, for buyers who already know their requirement.
• By application — residential, villa, commercial, retrofit. For buyers still narrowing down.

Each product page should at minimum answer: how large can it go, what configuration options exist, what does it look like installed, and is there anything to download.

3. Structuring project pages

Project pages convert better than almost anything else on an export site, yet most window sites give them a few photos and one line. A structure that works:

• Project type and region, so buyers can judge how close it is to their own situation
• The range and opening types used, linking the project back to the product pages
• The actual configuration: profile, glazing, hardware
• Installation photographs from several angles, including close-ups
• Where anything unusual was involved — oversized units, irregular shapes, difficult installation conditions — a note on how it was handled

4. Inquiries: a form isn't the only entry point

Contact preferences vary by region. Offering only a form loses a meaningful share of interested buyers.

• Form: suited to formal inquiries. Keep the fields few — product, quantity, region is enough
• Email: still the main channel for formal export correspondence, so make the address easy to find
• Instant messaging: in some markets buyers prefer to open a conversation this way
• Downloads: a product catalog or technical file is itself a capture point

What matters more is what happens after an inquiry arrives: who owns it, how fast it's answered, where it's recorded. However good the site, an inquiry that lands in one salesperson's inbox and gets no follow-up may as well not exist.

5. Technical basics

Skip these and the content above works at a discount:

• Languages: Chinese and English at minimum, adding others once target markets are settled. Each language needs its own URL and reciprocal declarations, not a browser translation plugin.
• Speed: overseas visitors are physically far away. Compressed images and static delivery are the baseline.
• Mobile: a good share of buyers browse first on a phone, so specification tables and drawings must remain readable on a small screen.
• Structured data: marking up product and company information in a standard format helps search engines read the page correctly.