An electrical firm fits a wall box in a semi-detached house in the morning and pulls cable through a factory hall in the afternoon. Its website shows one of those two jobs. That is the rule, not the exception: the German skilled trades association describes its sector as supplying private consumers, industry, retail and the public sector at the same time (ZDH). And the business customer on the other side is rarely a corporation with its own purchasing department: at 3.2 million, 99.3 percent of enterprises in Germany counted as small and medium-sized enterprises in 2024 (Destatis). Anyone who assumes that business customers need a completely different website with a completely different tone underestimates how similar the two paths are at their core - and overestimates how far a single piece of copy carries both. This article therefore treats the split not as a pricing question but as a question of structure: where the fork belongs, what differs on each path, which evidence each group checks, what a form with a branch looks like, and what stays shared so that two paths do not become two building sites.
Both groups in the order book, one group on the website
Ask owners about their customers and the answer usually comes in two halves: private clients on one side, property managers, developers, companies and municipalities on the other.
Ask where that split appears on the website and the room goes quiet. The underlying population is substantial: around 1.04 million businesses are entered in the trade registers and the register of trade-like businesses, and 13.7 percent of all employed people in Germany work in the sector (ZDH). A sizeable share of these firms serves both groups out of the same workshop, with the same people and the same vans - and describes itself online as though only one of them existed.
The reason is rarely negligence; it is the way the site came about. When you plan a website you think of the customer who called most recently, and in trades and services that is often the private one. From that picture comes a brief with a single audience, and everything else follows: imagery, examples, pricing logic, form fields. A second reason is the reasonable fear of overloading the page. Pack both groups into the same paragraph and you get sentences that convince neither the homeowner nor the property manager. The answer to that is not omission, it is separation.
The cost of getting this wrong is hard to quantify and easy to describe. A business prospect who finds nothing about framework contracts, maintenance intervals, measured billing or the documentation he owes his own client does not call to ask. That business customers buy through websites is not a guess: enterprises in the EU generated 8.39 percent of their total turnover from web sales in 2024; of that, 4.34 percent came from sales to other enterprises and public authorities and 4.04 percent from sales to private consumers (Eurostat). The business route through a website is not the little brother of the private one, it is roughly the same size. The fact that small and medium-sized enterprises accounted for only 27 percent of turnover in 2024 (Destatis) changes little: for a firm with eight staff, a property manager's contract is a good contract, regardless of that customer's share of the wider economy.
What really separates the two paths
The differences sort themselves onto five axes: the decision path, the price format, the evidence, contract law and language. On none of those axes is one group the better customer; they simply ask different questions of the same trade.
The private client usually decides alone or as a couple, often in the evening, and measures the decision by trust and price. The business client decides during working hours, often has a second person behind him who releases the budget, and measures by repeatability: can this firm do it again on the third property, in the same week, with the same documentation? A site that leaves this question unanswered gets no enquiry, however good the workmanship.
Scroll table sideways
| Feature | Private customer path | Business customer path |
|---|---|---|
| Decision | One person, often in the evening, one quote | Several people during office hours, budget released separately |
| Price shown | Total price including VAT | Net prices permitted where the offer targets businesses |
| First question | What does it cost and when can you come? | Can you deliver this repeatably and on schedule? |
| Evidence | Photos of finished work, reviews, master certificate | References with scope, punctuality, service contract |
| Form fields | Name, contact route, address, preferred date | Company, billing address, contact person, order number |
| End of contract | Right of withdrawal in distance selling | Validity period, framework contract, formal acceptance |
| Language | Everyday words, short sentences, one example | Technical terms, specification of works, standards |
That dividing line is not a matter of taste, it is written into law. A consumer is any natural person who enters into a legal transaction for purposes that are predominantly outside their trade, business or profession (German Civil Code, Section 13); an entrepreneur is a person acting in the exercise of exactly that activity when concluding the transaction (German Civil Code, Section 14). Everything else hangs on that classification: the duty to state prices, the right of withdrawal in distance contracts, which belongs to consumers (German Civil Code, Section 312g), and part of the information duties. For the website this means the fork separates more than tone of voice and photo selection - it separates legal consequences. Mix the two and you end up with too much legal boilerplate on the business path or too little on the private one.
The fork: visible, but not a doorman
The obvious implementation is also the worst: an interstitial page in front of the home page asking whether you are here privately or on business.
It costs a click before any trust has been built, it confuses visitors who cannot answer the question for themselves - the homeowner who bills the renovation through his small limited company belongs in both boxes - and it cuts search engines off from the actual content. The fork does not belong in front of the site, it belongs inside it. In practice that means one additional item in the main navigation, named the way the audience names itself, with a dedicated landing page behind it. It barely changes the question of which pages a business website actually needs: one item is added, not a second level.
The fork in the menu
A second main item next to your services, named the way the audience thinks: For companies and property managers rather than a sales abbreviation.
Two landing pages
One page per group with its own headline, its own promise and its own example. No blended copy that half serves both.
Price format per path
The total price on the private path, the net price on the business path with one sentence naming exactly who it applies to.
Evidence per path
Photos and reviews carry the private path, references with scope and punctuality carry the business one. Same site, two captions.
One form with a branch
One form, one choice at the top, then four extra fields for the business branch. No second inbox to maintain.
Shared foundation
Legal texts, contact details, directions and availability exist once and apply to both paths. Maintained in a single place.
What explicitly does not happen: the site is not duplicated. About us, directions, imprint, privacy policy, vacancies and availability apply to both paths and exist once. Only the places where expectations genuinely differ get a second version - along with the form of address that goes with them. Whether you use the same tone of address on both paths is a deliberate decision: a firm that is informal with private clients may be formal on the business path, but does not have to be. What matters is that the choice is held throughout a path, in the form, the confirmation email and the quote as well.
Prices: where the split becomes a legal matter
The German Price Indication Ordinance governs the private path.
It regulates the indication of prices for goods or services by entrepreneurs towards consumers (Price Indication Ordinance, Section 1 paragraph 1), and anyone offering goods or services to consumers, or advertising towards consumers with prices, must state the total price (Price Indication Ordinance, Section 3 paragraph 1). An hourly rate with a small-print note about VAT generally does not satisfy that towards consumers. Where an offer is clearly aimed at businesses only, the ordinance does not apply and net prices are permitted. The finer points of that distinction, including from-prices, flat rates and struck-through prices, are covered in the article on price statements and advertising claims.
In practice one simple rule follows: the private landing page shows the total price, the business page shows the net price with a line naming who it applies to. If both appear on the same page, put the two figures side by side and mark which is which. That the second figure is the everyday one in business is visible in the sector's own statistics: turnover in the German skilled trades reached around 783.2 billion euros excluding VAT in 2025 (ZDH). Which format - a fixed figure, a range, a from-price or a package - suits your service depends less on the customer group than on how the service is cut; the common models are described in showing prices on your website.
Two figures side by side, not a footnote
Evidence: each group checks something different
Both groups look for proof, but not the same proof. The private client checks whether the firm has done this before and whether it behaves well: before and after photos, an honest description, reviews, a named contact with a face.
The business client checks whether the firm can deliver without him having to rework anything: the scope and duration of comparable jobs, punctuality, documentation he can pass on to his own client. A project photo alone does not carry that second path - what turns project photos into solid references is the caption, not the picture.
- Scope instead of adjectives. Numbers count on the business path: 14 residential units, 3,200 square metres, four weeks on site, work carried out while the building stayed in use. Words like high-quality or careful do not replace a magnitude.
- Repeatability. A service contract, a fixed inspection cycle, a named stand-in during holidays. Being able to show that the work happens without the boss present wins against the one-man operation.
- Documentation. Test records, measurements, acceptance protocols, photos for the building file. For a private client these are extras; for a property manager they are the actual reason to award the job.
- Availability with a deadline. A promised response time is a selection criterion for property managers. Put it on the page only if it is set up internally and can be met - a broken promise costs more than a missing one.
- Photos and reviews. These carry the most weight on the private path, because they answer the question about conduct inside the house: is the site tidied up, does someone call when it runs late?
- Master certificate and registration. Relevant on both paths, but read differently: privately as a quality signal, commercially as a precondition that pre-qualification asks for anyway.
Same building site, two captions
One form with a branch instead of two forms
Two separate forms are the usual reflex and the more expensive solution: double maintenance, double spam protection, double recipient lists - and visitors who land in the wrong one. A single form with a branch is better.
The reason lies in the field count: research into checkout flows shows that the average checkout in 2024 ran to 11.3 form fields and that 17 percent of users have abandoned a purchase because checkout was too complicated (Baymard Institute). The same principle applies to an enquiry form on a smaller scale: every field someone fills in without understanding why costs you enquiries. Boiling a contact form down to the essentials is therefore the precondition before any second branch is added at all.
- One choice at the very top. Two buttons rather than a dropdown: I am enquiring privately - I am enquiring for a company or property manager. The second button reveals the extra fields; the first reveals nothing.
- Four extra fields in the business branch. Company name, billing address, contact person with a direct line, and one field for a purchase order number or cost centre. Preparing a quote rarely needs more than that.
- Different required fields. On the private path, a name, one contact route and a description are enough. On the business path, company and billing address are mandatory, because no quote goes out without them.
- Two subject lines, one inbox. The form email carries a recognisable marker per branch but lands in the same inbox. That keeps the handling chain simple while still making the split countable.
Those four extra fields have a practical reason that has nothing to do with curiosity: for a service supplied to another entrepreneur for that entrepreneur's business, the supplying firm is obliged to issue an invoice within six months, provided the transaction is not exempt under Section 4 numbers 8 to 29, and between domestic businesses as an electronic invoice in a structured format that allows electronic processing (German VAT Act, Section 14). Staggered transitional periods apply to the move to that format (German VAT Act, Section 27). Asking for the billing address only after the site visit costs you a round trip. Public sector clients often add a routing identification number, without which an invoice cannot be delivered at all. For recurring work from the same customers a separate route pays off: service forms for existing customers ask for less, because the master data is already on file.
Visibility: two paths mean two vocabularies
A private client searches for bathroom renovation cost or painter near me. A property manager searches for stairwell painting framework contract or ventilation system maintenance commercial.
Those terms rarely sit on the same page, because they carry different intentions and demand different answers. That is exactly what the second landing page is for: its own headline, its own title in the search result, its own vocabulary in the copy. Finding the terms customers actually type is the same craft on both paths. How far search language diverges by audience shows up most clearly where mandatory disclosures are searched alongside the product - for instance with listings on an estate agent site. And your own site remains the main route: 85.65 percent of EU enterprises with web sales used their own website or apps in 2024 (Eurostat).
- The business landing page has its own title and its own description in the search result, not the home page's.
- The headline contains the word the audience uses for itself: property manager, developer, facility management, municipality.
- At least one example on the page states the magnitude and duration of a comparable job.
- The page is reachable from the navigation and the footer, not only through a tile on the home page.
- There is a text link from the private landing page to the business one and back, so visitors who took the wrong turn can switch.
- Contacts on the business page are listed with a direct line, not reachable only through a form.
What has to stay measurable
Two paths call for two measuring points. A firm that only sees the total number of enquiries cannot tell whether the new business page is working.
Very little is needed: one field in the form that records the branch, and a report that counts enquiries per path - plus the question of how many turned into a quote and how many into a job. Which metrics suit small businesses here is a short list; three figures per path are enough to start. Seasonal swings belong in the reading: with a roofer after a storm, the ratio between private and business enquiries shifts within days without anything on the website having changed.
A website that serves both customer groups does not have two faces; it has two doors into the same house.
The rebuild in four steps
- Go through the last twelve months of jobs. How many came from private clients, how many from businesses, and how is turnover split? Only that figure decides how much room the second path gets. In some operations - a home care service addressing families and staff, for example - the dividing line runs not between private and business but between two roles. The method stays the same.
- Build one landing page, not ten. One good page for the weaker-served path beats five half-finished ones. It carries a headline, three services in that group's language, one example with figures, the price format and a contact with a direct line.
- Add the branch to the form. Choice at the top, four extra fields in the business branch, a marker in the subject line. Then send a test enquiry from both branches and check what arrives in the inbox.
- Use the page in conversation. Open the business page during a site visit and talk through it, and within two weeks you will notice which question is missing. Using the website as a tool in sales conversations is the fastest test bench there is.
Sources and Studies