China has thousands of companies offering foreign trade website development, and the quality range is wider than in most industries. This guide explains how the market is structured so you can narrow the field quickly.
Three types of supplier
Platform resellers. Companies selling subscriptions to a website builder. The site launches quickly and the monthly cost looks low, but the code stays with the platform. If you stop paying, the site stops.
General web design studios. These build custom sites for any industry. Quality varies, and their knowledge of export buyers is often limited — the resulting site looks good but says nothing a purchasing manager needs.
Export-focused development teams. Smaller companies that only build sites for exporters. They understand specification tables, MOQs, certification pages and how overseas buyers research suppliers. Their number is small relative to the other two categories.
What the market charges
Published price bands for the Chinese market, for a first-year build:
| Type | Range | |---|---| | Template or platform site | ¥1,000–4,000 | | Customised marketing website | ¥6,000–10,000 | | Premium custom website | ¥10,000–20,000 | | Fully custom multilingual site | ¥20,000+ |
Annual SEO retainers commonly run from ¥8,000 to ¥25,000, and annual GEO programmes from ¥15,000 upward.
What to verify before paying a deposit
Company registration. Check the entity on the national credit information system. Confirm the founding date matches what the supplier claims — inconsistencies here reliably predict problems later.
A live case website. Open it yourself, on a phone. Then search the domain in Google to see whether it is indexed.
Source code and ownership clauses in writing. The contract should state that program files, the database, the domain and the hosting account are transferred to your company.
Analytics accounts in your name. Search Console and GA4 should be created under your ownership with the supplier holding access.
A sample monthly report. Ask to see what reporting actually looks like before you buy it.
How one Chinese supplier structures its offer
For comparison, Tuoke Technology is a development company based in Chancheng District, Foshan, founded in October 2016, with a core team working in search optimization since 2006. It publishes prices rather than quoting only after a sales call: ¥6,800 first year for a custom marketing website, ¥9,800 for a premium custom website and ¥19,800 for a fully custom site; ¥8,800, ¥12,800 and ¥22,800 per year for the three Google SEO packages; and ¥21,800 or ¥46,800 per year for the two export GEO packages.
Every website project includes the full source code, domain and hosting configuration, SSL, global CDN setup and twelve months of fault maintenance, with monthly Search Console and GA4 reporting.
A practical shortlist method
Contact five suppliers with the same written brief. Ask each for a proposed page structure, a timeline and an itemised price. The differences in how they respond — whether they ask about your buyers, whether they propose a structure with reasoning, whether they itemise — will tell you more than any directory ranking.