What a German Buyer Checks Before Contacting You

Most factories imagine the first contact with a German buyer as an email that arrives out of nowhere. A name, a product, a question about price, and the relationship has begun.

In practice, the email is the last step of a process the buyer has already been running quietly, on their own, using only what is publicly available.

German and wider European purchasing is a documented process — buyers are often required to show why they approached a supplier, and to have something to point at when a decision is questioned internally. That means the screening happens before contact, not after, and it happens against sources you cannot control: your website, your company registration, your published certificates, your domain records.

The useful part of that is this. You cannot influence the conversation you never receive — but you can make the screening come out in your favour, and it is a finite list. Here is what gets checked.

1. Whether you are a real, verifiable business

The first pass is verification. The buyer is establishing that the company has a legal identity, a physical location, and a history — not because they expect fraud, but because the alternative is a supplier who disappears after payment.

What they are looking at:

• A company name that matches what appears in business registrations, with the legal form and registration details available


• A real address — not a virtual office, and ideally one that appears consistent across your website, your invoices, and any directory listing


• Evidence of time in business: founding year, scale, facilities, the kind of thing that can be independently confirmed rather than only asserted

A buyer who cannot verify the company will usually not email to ask. They will simply stop. This is the single most common reason a good factory never hears from a serious buyer.

2. Whether you comply with the rules that apply to your website

This surprises many exporters, and it is where European buyers differ most from buyers elsewhere.

German law requires commercial websites to publish an Impressum — a legal disclosure showing the operator's identity and contact details. European data protection rules apply to any site collecting visitor data, which means a privacy policy and a cookie notice are not optional extras but baseline expectations. And if you collect enquiries through a form, how that data is stored and used is part of the same question.

You do not need to be an expert to clear this bar. You do need:

• An Impressum-style page or section with your legal name, address, and a way to contact a responsible person


• A privacy policy that says what happens to submitted data


• A cookie or consent notice if your site uses tracking

Fair or not, a European buyer who finds a website with none of this reads it as a company that has not done this before — and applies that same conclusion to your export paperwork.

3. Whether the product is compliant and documented

If your product category falls under European rules, the compliance question is asked before the commercial one.

Depending on your product, this can include a CE marking under the applicable EU directive or regulation, REACH obligations for chemical substances, RoHS restrictions in electrical and electronic equipment, and, for some categories, extended producer responsibility or waste regulations in the destination country.

Two details matter more than the list:

• Documents, not claims. A buyer needs the declaration of conformity, the technical file, the test reports. A line on your website saying "CE certified" without the paperwork behind it does nothing.


• Scope. "CE" is not a single thing — it depends on which directive applies to your product. A buyer who knows this will check whether your documentation actually covers their product, not just your category. Being clear and specific here is a competitive advantage, because so many suppliers are vague.

4. Whether your technical information is enough to write a real email

Now the practical question: can this buyer write a specific enquiry, or would they have to ask five basic questions first?

A European buyer preparing an internal request needs something to write down. If your website presents the product only as a category — "steel structures, high quality, competitive prices" — there is nothing for them to bring to a colleague.

What makes an enquiry possible:

• Specifications with units and standards named


• Product variants, and what differs between them


• Order range: minimum quantities, typical volumes


• Lead times with a named starting point


• Technical documents available in English, at least at summary level

The goal is not to answer everything. It is to give the buyer enough that their first email can be about their requirement rather than about yours.

5. Whether there is a person, and a next step

The last check is small and often skipped: is there a named contact, and is there an obvious next action?

An info@ address with no name, no role, and no indication of who handles export enquiries gives the buyer nothing to address. A named contact — even a role-based one, such as an export manager — converts a corporate website into a correspondent.

Equally, the page should propose a step. "Contact us" is not a step. "Send us your drawing and we will confirm feasibility within two working days" is.

Why this is not as harsh as it sounds

None of these checks are about you being large, modern, or famous. A small factory that publishes an accurate address, a real contact, honest specifications, and the compliance documents it actually holds will pass every one of them.

What fails is not scale. It is absence — the missing Impressum, the missing specification, the missing name, the certificate that is claimed but not shown.

That is the encouraging part. Every item on this list is a task you can finish this month, and none of it requires a budget.

A checklist you can work through

• Legal name, address, and registration details published and consistent across your site and documents


• An Impressum-style disclosure page, plus a privacy policy and cookie notice if your site uses tracking


• Compliance documents you actually hold — declarations of conformity, test reports — available in English, with scope made clear


• Product pages that name specifications, variants, order range, and lead times with real anchors


• A named export contact, with an expected response time


• One clear proposed next step on every product page

The same discipline shows up later, when a buyer visits — see what they check during a factory audit in What a Buyer Is Actually Checking When They Audit Your Factory. If you would like to compare notes on how a site reads to a European buyer, get in touch.