Oxford, Ohio · Butler County & Greater Cincinnati
A contact form is a bad way to receive an RFQ
Most job shop websites end at a form with a message box. Someone types "need a quote on a part" and attaches nothing, and then a week of email goes back and forth establishing what you needed to know in the first place.
This is probably you if
- Your RFQs arrive as vague messages with no drawing
- The site has not changed in a decade
- No capability, equipment or certification pages
- Customers cannot upload a file anywhere on the site
- You lose work to shops that quote faster
The RFQ problem
The information you need to quote is always the same: material, quantity, tolerance, finish, deadline, and the drawing. A generic contact form asks for none of it, so every enquiry starts with a round of questions.
Meanwhile the shop down the road that put a real RFQ form on their site got the drawing on day one and quoted before you finished asking.
What I build instead
A site that looks like a serious manufacturer rather than a 2009 template, with a proper RFQ intake: file upload for drawings and STEP files, the fields you actually quote from, and capability and certification pages that answer the questions buyers screen on.
From there it connects to the quoting work: the drawing gets read, a draft quote gets prepared, and you check it rather than starting from a blank template.
Buyers check before they call
Procurement people search for capability and certification before they contact anyone. Pages covering your equipment list, tolerances, materials and certifications are what get you onto the shortlist, and most shop sites do not have them.
Questions people actually ask
- Can customers upload drawings and CAD files?
- Yes. PDF, STEP, DXF and the usual formats, going straight to wherever you want them rather than to an inbox.
- Is our drawing data secure?
- Uploads go to storage you control. For defense or ITAR-adjacent work that constraint shapes the build from the start rather than being added afterwards.
- Do we need the quoting automation too?
- No. Plenty of shops start with just the site and a proper RFQ form, then add the quoting side once they see the intake working.
Worth a conversation?
Fifteen or twenty minutes about how your business actually runs. No deck, no discovery fee. If I do not think there is anything here worth building, I will tell you that.
Book a callWorking with businesses in Oxford, Hamilton, Fairfield, West Chester, Liberty Township, Middletown, Monroe, Trenton, Mason and Cincinnati.
Last reviewed .