How do you earn the trust of Chinese buyers?

Most of the advice we read stops at guanxi and patience. That’s hard to act on when your first contact is a stranger reading your website.

This guide looks at what a buyer can actually check, and how good the evidence is. It’s part of our guide on how to find Chinese customers.

What do Chinese buyers need you to prove?

Five things: that you exist, that you can do the job, that others vouch for you, that you’ll answer, and that you’re honest about limits.

This grouping is our own reading of the sources below.

What the buyer worries about	What answers it	Basis
Is this company real and official?	Official site, named company, visible local contact	Usability study 1
Can they do it?	Real photos, similar projects, case studies	Usability study 1
Who else says so?	Press, public reviews, past customers who take calls	Study and agency views 19
Will they answer me?	Chat with a record of the exchange	Usability study 1
What happens if it goes wrong?	Clear terms on taxes, invoices and returns	Usability study 1

Don’t assume being foreign does this work for you. In McKinsey’s 2022 survey, as reported by Yicai, 49% of consumers rated domestic brands better in quality, and 23% said the reverse.²

Borrowed foreignness can backfire too. A Southern Metropolis Daily survey ranked “fake foreign brands” (假洋牌) as the third most hated marketing tactic in 2026.³

That cuts in your favor if you can prove you’re genuine. It also means that foreign styling alone proves nothing.

How strong is the evidence?

It’s thin, and the guides we read don’t tell you so. We found no recent survey that ranks trust signals for Chinese B2B buyers. These are the best sources we read.

Source	What it covers	Limit
Nielsen Norman Group, 2017 1	How Chinese B2B buyers judge websites	8 participants, and now dated
B2B International, 2009 6	100 interviews with owners and senior purchasers in Beijing and Shanghai	Old, and written by a research firm’s director
Xie and colleagues, 2010 5	155 relationships between Chinese suppliers and foreign buyers	Suppliers trusting buyers, the reverse of your case
Southern Metropolis Daily, 2026 3	6,850 respondents	Consumers, and the coverage we read doesn’t explain the sampling
Agency guides, 2020 to 2026 891617	Practical tactics	Opinions from firms selling these services

Use the rest of this page as a set of reasoned bets, not as proven levers.

What should your Chinese website show?

Show what a careful buyer would look for to rule you out. For the Nielsen Norman Group participants, design quality came first, and one weak element could spoil the rest.¹

One participant dropped a video over its lazy voice and background noise, and that outweighed his good first impression of the site’s design.¹ Our guide to website design for Chinese users covers the layout side.

• Official status. Put 官网 (“official website”) in your homepage title and your company name in the domain, as the study recommends.¹
• Local presence. Name your distributor or local contact. A distributor confirmed by the brand’s own site was the best option for one participant.¹
• Real photos. Show your own products and before-and-after project photos. Your logo on products in photos made images feel more authentic.¹
• Similar work. Case studies count most when they come from the region. As one participant said, “they have actually done these similar projects before.”¹
• Past customers. Listing their contact details is common in China, and participants said they would call them to check claims. Client logos also signal experience.¹ Get written consent first.
• Chat. Participants preferred it to phone calls, because they could prepare questions and keep a record.¹

Translation alone won’t carry this. The study says content must also follow regional conventions, or people won’t trust the organization.¹

That even applies to discounts. One participant called a “60% off” banner Western style, and the study notes that promotions in China usually show the percentage paid, so 40.¹

The chat point matters more than it looks. Participants used it to ask about discounts, hidden taxes, invoice fees and authenticity. When a Taobao seller dodged the authenticity question, one participant didn’t buy.¹

Our guide to answering Chinese enquiries covers who does this if you don’t speak Chinese. One agency also says buyers rarely use email or web forms,¹⁷ but it gives no data, so test it.

What if you have no Chinese clients yet?

Lead with proof you can stand behind, and don’t dress it up as Chinese experience.

The study says many people in China avoid being first to try something new. Without regional examples, participants accepted enough detail about past work in similar markets.¹

1. List what can be checked today. Your registration, years in business, certificates, patents, press coverage and named team.
2. Pick your closest cases. Choose work for a similar buyer, in the same sector, or in Asia.
3. Ask for permission. Get written consent from each client you name, and ask if a buyer may call them.
4. Give the source of each claim. A date, an issuer or a link lets a skeptical reader check it.
5. Say what’s new. State plainly that China is a new market for you, and explain who will serve the buyer.

If a buyer asks for formal company documents, an apostille may help. For public documents, it has replaced consular legalization between China and other member countries since November 7, 2023.¹⁵ Check your country first: one law firm reports that India objected.¹⁸

Private documents, such as a power of attorney, must be notarized first.¹⁵ Rouse describes acceptance by Chinese courts, so ask your buyer what they need.

Why does third-party proof count for more than your site?

Because you control your own site, and a careful reader knows that. Baidu Baike applies that logic to its own entries: an official site can be changed at will, so commercial content needs support from another authoritative site.⁷

An older source points the same way. The B2B International article warns that exaggeration can damage trust, and tells suppliers to focus on the credentials they have.⁶

Agencies list these outside sources, mostly without data:⁸⁹¹⁷

• Trade press and sector media
• Answers and peer discussion on Zhihu
• Public reviews, including imperfect ones
• Trade fairs and offline meetings
• Well-known platforms, which lend you their credibility

The last one comes up outside agency blogs too. A consultant quoted in coverage of the 2026 survey says many people trust a merchant because they trust the platform.³ That’s an expert’s view, not a survey result.

Nanjing Marketing Group also says Chinese consumers place a lot of trust in marketplaces, and describes payment platforms as an escrow service.¹⁶

Marketing to China says a buyer will check you on Baidu and WeChat before agreeing to meet.⁹ So check what a search for your name shows in Chinese. Our guides on how Chinese buyers search and Baike and Tieba explain where to look.

Free check

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Do you still need guanxi?

Often, but guanxi alone isn’t trust. Kriz and Fang argued in 2003 that “guanxi opens the door but it is xinren that determines how well you will be treated once you are in.”⁴

Xinren means deep trust, and that distinction is useful in practice. A contact or an introduction gets you a meeting. Your conduct afterward decides what the meeting is worth.

Guanxi

• Introductions
• Network
• Recommendation

Xinren

• Open exchange of information
• Practical help
• Ongoing relationship

VS

Kriz and Fang 2003, Xie et al. 2010

The closest quantitative study we found runs in the other direction, from Chinese suppliers toward foreign buyers. It still suggests two tracks:⁵

Type of trust	What built it
Cognition-based, or rational	Open information exchange, institutionalized cooperation
Affect-based, or emotional	Socialized interaction, practical help from the foreign firm

Those two were complementary.⁵ You need the file and the relationship.

The B2B International article said much the same in 2009, stressing personal engagement and calling unfriendliness potentially “fatal.”⁶

A website can’t create this. It can earn the first conversation, and our guide to B2B marketing in China covers what comes after.

Which proof can backfire?

Anything you can’t document. Beyond losing the buyer, Chinese rules cover much of what trust advice recommends.

Trust tactic	The rule	Source
Quoting figures, surveys or other sources	Must be true and accurate, with the source stated	Advertising Law, art. 11 10
Claiming to be the best	“最佳” and similar terms are banned	Art. 9(3) 10
Using a third party’s name or image	Written consent needed first	Art. 33 10
Paying an endorser	Can only recommend what they have used	Art. 38 10
Inventing reviews, or hiding bad ones	Banned, including pushing negative reviews down	SAMR Order 91, art. 9(4) 11
Paying for good reviews	Cash back, red packets and coupons are banned	Art. 9(5) 11
Inventing sales figures	Banned	Art. 9(2) 11

The penalties in the law are high. False advertising carries a fine of 3 to 5 times the advertising cost, or RMB 200,000 to 1,000,000 if that cost can’t be calculated or is clearly low, and more for repeat or serious cases.¹⁰

Absolute terms carry RMB 200,000 to 1,000,000 for the advertiser.¹⁰

Two more traps are worth checking:

• ICP numbers. Sites that hold one must display it on the homepage.¹³ We found no source measuring its effect on trust, and a number that isn’t yours is a false claim.
• Filtered reviews. One agency says listings that look too clean raise more doubt than those with a fair complaint.⁸ The rule on hiding bad reviews points the same way.¹¹

Our guide to banned advertising words lists the terms to avoid.

What should you admit up front?

State what you can’t do before the buyer finds it out. In the 2026 survey, 63.15% would give a second chance to a brand that makes a sincere recall and puts things right. The same passage says brands should admit a problem at once.³

That finding is about consumers and recalls, so treat the link to B2B as our inference.

The usual gaps for a foreign company are predictable, so prepare your answers.

Likely question	A straight answer covers
Can you issue a fapiao?	Stripe’s guide says only an entity registered for VAT in China can.14 Say what you issue instead, confirm it with a tax adviser, and see our guide to invoicing and the fapiao
How do I pay?	The methods you really accept. See Alipay and WeChat Pay
What about taxes and fees?	Who pays what, before the quote
What if it’s the wrong item?	Your return terms. One participant worried about this 1
Is this genuine?	A direct answer, with the proof. One participant walked away from a seller who dodged this 1

The bottom line

Trust comes from things a skeptical buyer can verify. Build a site that proves you’re real, gather proof from outside your own pages, and answer direct questions directly.

If you have no Chinese references, say so and show your nearest evidence. Don’t invent what you don’t have.

How Index in China can help

We translate your site into Simplified Chinese with a human reviewer, work on getting it indexed on Chinese search engines and send a monthly report on Chinese traffic. We don’t guarantee traffic.

That makes your proof readable and findable, but the proof itself has to come from you. See what we do or book a 30-minute call.

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