What these guides are for
These guides are written to help buyers get a comparable, complete and verifiable quotation. They apply to any supplier, including us, and they are deliberately written as a checklist rather than a sales argument — a supplier that cannot answer the questions below has not yet given you a quotation you can act on.
Two quotations for the same project are rarely comparable as issued. The differences that matter are usually what is missing rather than what is priced.
Most disputes in imported playground equipment trace back to something that could have been established with a document before the order was placed.
These are errors that are cheap to avoid at design stage and expensive to fix after manufacture or installation.
The four items most often missing are safety surfacing, installation labour, the Incoterm, and the fall height data needed to specify surfacing. A quotation that does not state all four cannot be compared with one that does. Surfacing alone is commonly 25 to 40 percent of the installed cost, so its absence can make an incomplete quotation appear substantially cheaper.
Ask for a live video walkthrough rather than photographs, since photographs of any factory can be obtained from elsewhere. Check the business licence name against the company name on the quotation and the bank account details — mismatched names are the most common mechanism of payment fraud in this trade. Ask for two reference customers in comparable markets and contact them directly.
A type-test report from an accredited test house such as TÜV or SGS, issued for the specific product, naming the standard and its parts. A supplier letter declaring conformity is a self-declaration and carries much less weight. Public tenders in most markets require the type-test report, and it is difficult to obtain retroactively if the manufacturer did not commission one.
In practice it is specifying grade 304 stainless steel for a coastal site. Chloride pitting typically appears within one to two years and the affected components have to be replaced rather than repaired, so the saving on the initial purchase is lost several times over. The second most expensive is designing a layout against the wrong standard, which is only discovered when the installation fails a compliance check.
Send us a quotation from another supplier and we will tell you what it includes, what it omits and where the specification is ambiguous. No obligation.