Teardown: the components supplier whose website sends every buyer to the phone

Another anonymised composite — a stand-in for a pattern common across industrial-component and fastener suppliers, not a real named company. Same purpose: show what the buyer experiences.

This one looks better than most at first glance — a tidy site, a proper product catalogue, clear branding. It’s only when you try to use it as a buyer that the problems show. And the buyer here is a maintenance engineer who needs a specific fixing, in a specific size and material, and wants to order forty of them before lunch.

The catalogue: browsable, but not searchable

The products are organised into neat categories with nice photos. But the engineer doesn’t want to browse — they know exactly what they need. They try the search box: it returns results by product name, not by spec. Searching the thread size or the material returns nothing useful. So the engineer is reduced to clicking through categories hoping to recognise the right part.

For a buyer who arrives knowing their spec, “browse our range” is friction. They want to type the size and land on the part.

What I’d change: make the range searchable and filterable by the attributes buyers actually search — size, material, grade, rating — so the buyer who knows what they want gets there in one step.

The product page: a photo and a part number

They find something that might be right. The product page has a photo, a part number, a one-line description, and a “Enquire” button. What it doesn’t have: the dimensions, the material spec, the load rating, a datasheet. The engineer can’t confirm this is the right part without asking.

So they can’t just order. They have to enquire, and wait, to establish something the page should have told them outright. Every product page that withholds the spec is a product page that manufactures a phone call.

What I’d change: put the full spec and a datasheet on the product page. The buyer confirms the fit themselves and acts — no phone tag.

Reordering: forty parts, one phone call

Here’s the real cost. This engineer orders the same fixings every few weeks. There’s no account, no order history, no reordering — every order means finding the parts again and either phoning or emailing. It works, but it’s friction the buyer feels every single time. The day a competitor lets them log in and reorder in two clicks, this supplier loses an account it thought was loyal.

What I’d change: a trade account with reordering — see your pricing, pull your history, reorder in a couple of clicks. For a repeat-order business this isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the moat.

Findability and AI: invisible for the exact spec

Because the specs live only as photos and part numbers — not as readable, structured content — this site is close to invisible when a buyer searches for a component by its specification, on Google or through an AI assistant. The supplier stocks exactly what the buyer wants and still doesn’t come up, because the page never says, in words a machine can read, what the part actually is.

What I’d change: structured spec content per product, so search and AI can match a buyer’s exact requirement to the right part.

The verdict

This one scores about a 4.5 out of 10 — better than the average, precisely because the bones are there. It has a real catalogue and a clear brand. But it treats the website as a brochure to look at rather than a system to transact with, and for a repeat-order components business that’s a large amount of money left on the table, mostly in the form of unnecessary phone calls and quietly-poachable accounts.

What I’d fix first: (1) spec + datasheet on every product page; (2) search and filter by attribute; (3) trade accounts with reordering. In that order, each one removes a reason the buyer currently has to phone — or to leave.

Curious how your own site scores on this kind of thing? The two-minute scorecard runs the same checks, or book a call for a walk-through of your actual pages.