Web design & e-commerce: a site that sells while you sleep — for Manufacturing

Manufacturing in DACH and Europe more broadly is dominated by mid-market specialists — the Hidden Champions, the Mittelstand machine builders, the contract manufacturers, the Tier-1 and Tier-2 automotive suppliers. These businesses are extraordinarily good at their physical product and consistently undersupplied on software. ERPs are old (SAP ECC, Navision, ProAlpha), MES systems are partial or absent, customer-facing tooling barely exists, and CRMs are spreadsheets in 60% of cases. The decision-makers are pragmatic and ROI-driven — a manufacturer will sign for a piece of software the day they can see what it will save on the shop floor, and not before. Long-term partnerships matter; vendor-hopping is rare.

• ▸B2B catalogues are 3–4 orders of magnitude more complex than B2C — variants, attributes, conditional pricing, customer-specific catalogues.
• ▸PunchOut and OCI integration support — large B2B buyers expect to access your catalogue from inside their SAP/Coupa/Ariba procurement system.
• ▸Approval flows on the buyer side — checkout that respects a buyer's internal P-card limits, approval chains, and PO requirements.
• ▸Multi-language and per-region pricing — manufacturers usually have negotiated rates per country, distributor, contract.
• ▸Spec sheets, datasheets, and certifications must be first-class search artefacts — engineers find products by datasheet, not by marketing copy.
• ▸The site needs an internal-tools twin — what the customer sees, the inside sales team needs a richer version of.

For a niche industrial-fastener manufacturer, we rebuilt their catalogue site with structured variant search and downloadable datasheets — organic traffic from engineering search queries tripled within six months, and inbound qualified leads doubled.