Website Design for Automotive and Mobility Suppliers
Built for the people who qualify you before the RFQ goes out.
Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers do not win programs from a website the way a consumer brand wins a sale. But purchasing, engineering and program teams absolutely use one — to check your scope before adding you to a bid list, to confirm your certifications are current, and to judge whether you look like a supplier who will still be delivering at rate in year four.
Who this is for.
Supplier is a broad word. These are the businesses this page is written for — if you recognise yourself in two or three of them, we are talking about the same problem.
Tier 1 suppliers shipping direct to an OEM
You are on the customer portal, you are measured on launch timing, and your reputation travels between purchasing groups faster than any marketing you could buy. The public site carries the first impression for new commodity buyers, prospective Tier 2 partners and the engineering talent you are competing for.
Tier 2 suppliers selling into Tier 1s
You are found by process, capability and region rather than by name. Resourcing exercises, second-source requirements and capacity gaps are where your enquiries come from, and every one of them starts with somebody searching.
Tier 3 and specialist process houses
Heat treating, plating, finishing, testing, tooling. Often a single process done exceptionally well, and almost always under-represented online relative to how good the shop actually is.
Contract manufacturers and build-to-print shops
You do not own a product, you own capability and capacity. The site has to make both legible to somebody holding a print, without pretending to be a catalog.
Mobility, EV and off-highway suppliers
Battery, thermal, power electronics, charging, agricultural and construction equipment. Newer supply chains, faster program cycles, and buyers who are genuinely still discovering who can do the work.
Distributors and service centres feeding the supply base
Steel, fasteners, components, MRO. Your buyer is the same person — an engineer or a purchasing agent with a specification and a deadline.
What we already understand about the people evaluating you.
Fifteen years of manufacturing and industrial work, pointed at the automotive supply base. If this does not describe your business, say so — some of our best projects started outside the pattern.
Your buyer is qualifying you, not discovering you
By the time a commodity buyer or a supplier development engineer opens your site, they already have your name — from a directory, a trade show, a resourcing exercise, or a colleague. The site's job is not to introduce you. It is to survive a five-minute check on scope, capacity, certification and program history without raising a single question you cannot answer. That check happens long before a program award is on the table, and it is the stage at which suppliers are quietly dropped from consideration without ever learning they were on the list.
Certification is the first filter, not a footer badge
IATF 16949, ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and whatever customer-specific requirements sit on top. If the certificate scope, the certifying body and the expiry date are not visible and current, you have introduced doubt at the exact moment you needed to remove it. A JPEG of a certificate from three years ago is worse than no certificate at all.
Capability is a spec sheet, not an adjective
"Precision machining" tells a buyer nothing they can act on. Press tonnage range, bed sizes, tolerance capability, materials and grades, secondary operations, whether tooling is in-house, and the EAU bands you are actually set up to run — that is what gets you shortlisted. Everything softer than that reads as a company hoping not to be asked.
The RFQ is the conversion, and it is a document exchange
A supplier enquiry does not arrive as a contact form. It arrives as a print, often a 3D model, a volume estimate and a target date. If your site cannot take a drawing securely, the enquiry moves to somebody's personal email — and you lose the routing, the timestamp, the audit trail and, often, the follow-up.
The RFQ flow, built the way quoting actually works.
Most supplier sites end at a contact form and hand the real work back to email. This is the part we build properly, because it is the part that decides whether an enquiry becomes a quote.
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01
Intake that asks what an estimator needs
Part number or description, the print or model, estimated annual usage, target SOP, required certifications, and whether this is a new program, a resource or a second source. Six fields that a buyer can answer, not a twenty-field form they abandon.
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02
Routing by process, not to a shared inbox
A stamping enquiry reaches the person who quotes stamping. Routing by process, tonnage or commodity means the first human response comes from someone who can actually assess it.
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03
Acknowledgement with a real date
An automatic reply carrying a reference number and a realistic quote date. Silence after an RFQ upload is the fastest way to lose a first-time enquiry.
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04
Feasibility review before pricing
Engineering sees the print early. Design-for-manufacture feedback at this stage is the cheapest credibility you will ever buy, and it is frequently the reason a supplier is remembered next time.
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05
A quote that reflects tooling and volume
Piece price against EAU bands, tooling separated, secondary operations itemised, assumptions stated. A quote that hides its assumptions gets renegotiated later, usually badly.
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06
The whole thing lands in your systems
The enquiry, the drawing and the quote in CRM against a named opportunity — so the follow-up happens whether or not the estimator remembers.
Presenting capability and certification so it survives scrutiny.
This is the section suppliers most often get wrong, and it is the cheapest one to get right. The rule throughout: publish what can be checked, and publish nothing that cannot.
Certificates as structured, current facts
Standard, scope statement, certifying body, certificate number and expiry date, written as text on the page rather than sealed inside a scanned image. Text can be read by a buyer skimming on a phone, indexed by a search engine, and quoted by an answer engine — a JPEG can do none of those. Attach a review date to each entry so an expired certificate is caught internally rather than by a customer.
Scope stated per facility
A multi-plant supplier rarely holds identical scope across sites. Pooling several certificates into one corporate claim reads well until a buyer evaluating a specific plant asks a specific question. Per-site scope removes the awkward correction and, incidentally, gives each facility a page worth ranking.
Equipment and capacity in numbers
Machine type, capacity, envelope, count, shift pattern. Press tonnage ranges, bed sizes, tolerance capability, materials and grades, secondary operations, whether tooling is designed and built in-house. If a figure moves quarter to quarter, publish the band rather than omitting it — a range is qualifiable, silence is not.
Program history without breaching an NDA
Most supplier work cannot name its customer, and buyers know that. The shape of the work still carries: the component type, the process, the annual volume band, the launch role, the years in production, the requalifications passed. Written that way, program history is publishable and still persuasive.
Quality behaviour, not just the badge
IATF 16949 tells a buyer you passed an audit. What they actually want to know is how you behave: APQP discipline through a launch, the PPAP submission levels you routinely support, run-at-rate experience, layout inspection and requalification cadence, and what happens on the day something goes wrong. A short, honest account of that outperforms any certificate wall.
A position on controlled data, stated up front
Confidentiality at the point of upload, not buried in a policy. Where work is genuinely controlled — or where ITAR or EAR applies — the answer is usually to keep it off the public site and route it through an access-controlled path instead. Saying so plainly reassures the buyers who care and costs nothing with the ones who do not.
Suppliers and industrial manufacturers we have built for.
Steel service centres, seating and mechanism suppliers, indexing and automation builders, storage systems and distributors. The common thread is a technical buyer, a specification, and a quote at the end of it.
Questions suppliers ask us.
Do we need a public parts catalog?
Usually not. A catalog makes sense when you sell a defined product range; most build-to-print suppliers are better served by a capability and process structure with a strong RFQ path. The decision follows how you actually win work — if buyers arrive knowing the part they need made, a catalog is the wrong shape entirely.
Can buyers upload drawings securely?
Yes, and it is usually the single highest-value thing on the site. Large-file upload, a stated confidentiality position before the file is sent, storage you control, and routing to the right estimator. Where the data is genuinely controlled, the upload can sit behind a short access step rather than in the open.
How do we handle NDAs and controlled technical data?
We build to the position your quality and legal teams already hold rather than inventing one. That ranges from a plain confidentiality statement at the point of upload, through a click-through mutual NDA, to keeping controlled work off the public site entirely and routing it into an access-controlled area. If ITAR or EAR applies to any part of your work, that scoping conversation happens before design, not after.
Will this integrate with our ERP or MRP?
That is the part most agencies hand off, and it is the part we keep. Epicor, Plex, NetSuite, Dynamics, Global Shop, IQMS or a system with one person left who understands it — if it has a database or an API we can reach it. The honest constraint is data quality: a clean integration on messy part data still produces a site that misleads people.
We are Tier 2 and the OEM never sees us. Is this worth it?
Tier 2 is where the site does the most work, because Tier 1 purchasing is actively looking for you. Resourcing exercises, second-source requirements, nearshoring decisions and capacity gaps all start with somebody searching for a process and a region. A Tier 1 buyer who cannot confirm your scope in five minutes moves to the supplier who made it easy.
How long does a supplier site take?
A focused capability and RFQ build is typically eight to twelve weeks. Adding ERP integration, a genuine part or process finder, or a customer portal moves it further out. We phase it with a budget against each phase, so the RFQ path can go live before the longer integration work finishes.