23% of shops publish a tolerance, 2% of those put it on the contact page

If you own or market a manufacturing shop, I’d probably spend part of this afternoon nailing down one sentence for the contact page.

96% of the 3,828 sites quote at least one number, and the median site quotes seven. Founding year, square footage, employee count, years in business, machine count, tonnage, ISO revision. Plenty of numbers.

23% quote a tolerance. That’s the number a buyer needs to decide whether to send you the part. Three sites in four never say it.

Twenty of them

The contact page seemed vital to check, so I read every one I captured, 3,512 of them, and asked one question: is a tolerance on it.

I wanted to confirm it, so I asked it twice, two different ways. One test looks for the shop’s own recorded tolerance text on its contact page. The other is a pattern match built to trip easily, so when it finds nothing, that means something. They find 12 and 17, they agree on 9, and 20 sites come up under one test or the other.

So 20 sites in 3,828 put a tolerance on the contact page. That’s 2% of the 889 who publish one anywhere.

ACP Waterjet is one of the 20. Its contact page reads “Cutting tolerance ±0.010″ standard, ±0.005″ on request”. Ponoko is another: “Dimensional accuracy from ±0.003in / 0.08mm.”

Plenty of the 889 put it on the homepage, and that helps. But then the buyer decides you’re worth a try and clicks to contact. Now he’s filling out a form: his name, his company, his phone number, and a text box marked Tell us about your project. The one fact that would tell him whether to bother... it’s on the page he just left.

Apparently he was supposed to remember.

Same percentage, different shops

23% quote a tolerance and 23% ask for a drawing, and I’d expect those to be the same shops. Both sound like someone built the site for an engineer with a part in hand.

Only 8% of all the sites do both. Of the 869 that ask for your drawing, 37% quote a tolerance anywhere on the site. 62% of the sites do neither.

So at nearly two sites in three, the buyer holding a drawing with a tight callout gets no answer about what the shop can hold.

That’s a lot of work to leave to the buyer.

One line above the form

Here’s what I’d put on the contact page:

We hold ± .0005 on the work we quote from this form. If yours is tighter, say so in the box and we will tell you honestly whether we can.

You could dial in your own number.

My line does three things the rest of the page doesn’t. The capability sits where the buyer has to decide, instead of back on another page. A buyer with a tighter part gets invited to say so. And it’s a qualifying question, phrased like a courtesy.

Then there’s honestly. You’ve promised to say so when you can’t. Mean it.

The contact page has an administrator

I don’t think laziness explains this. The contact page is a form. You configure a form, you don’t sit down to write it.

So the parts of the site that describe the shop get written, and the parts where the deal happens get configured. Being specific about your buyer is one habit. Being specific about the deal is another.

Everything else on a manufacturer site has an author. The contact page has an administrator.

I measured tolerance placement by reading every contact page I captured, 3,512 of them, with two tests that do not share a parse: the shop’s own recorded tolerance text searched on its own contact page, and a deterministic pattern match. An earlier version of this piece counted only the FIRST page a tolerance appeared on, which measured page order, not whether the number is where the buyer needs it. The example sentence above is mine, not a quote from any site. Percentages are of 3,828 manufacturer websites competing for US work.