The Acrylic Display RFQ: 12 Specs Every Buyer Should Send Upfront

You send the same acrylic display drawing to five Shenzhen factories. A week later three quotes come back, and they are impossible to put side by side. One priced 3mm cast acrylic, one 5mm extruded, one left thickness off the page entirely. One quoted FOB, one EXW, one wrote "to be confirmed." One assumed a 500-piece run, one assumed 2,000. The unit prices span a 40% range, and not one of them is wrong — each factory simply filled the gaps in your request with its own cheapest reasonable assumption.

The fix is upstream of the quotes. At the request-for-quotation stage, your real job is not to collect prices; it is to remove the degrees of freedom that make prices incomparable. Every spec you leave blank is a variable the factory gets to define, and it will define it in the direction that wins the order. This is the acrylic display RFQ template — the twelve line items that turn a scatter of guesses into quotes you can actually rank. It pairs with the broader seven-step playbook on how to source acrylic displays from China; this article narrows in on the document that starts the whole exchange.

Why an incomplete RFQ comes back as non-comparable quotes

A custom acrylic display is a build-to-order product, which means there is no catalog price to anchor against. The factory prices the specific configuration you describe — and if you describe it loosely, the engineer quoting your job has to make assumptions about material grade, thickness, edge work, print method, hardware and packaging before a number can exist. Two factories making different assumptions produce two prices that measure two different products.

This is why "just send your best price" is the weakest possible RFQ. The strongest RFQ reads almost like a partial spec sheet: it pins down everything that drives cost and leaves only genuine supplier-side variables — the factory's own efficiency, tooling amortization and margin — to compete on. When you do that, a quote spread stops being noise and starts being signal: the cheap outlier is either a real efficiency advantage or a misread you can question directly, rather than a different product hiding behind the same drawing.

The 12-line acrylic display RFQ — at a glance

The table below is the skeleton. Each row is a line item to state explicitly in the request; the deep-dives that follow explain how to fill the rows that carry the most cost weight.

The five engineering specs that move the price

Rows one through five are where most of the unit cost lives, and they are the rows buyers most often under-specify. Dimensions and tolerances come first because the factory cannot estimate material yield or tooling without them; state overall size, the load-bearing internal dimensions, and an acceptable tolerance band rather than leaving "approximately" on the drawing. Material and thickness is the single largest price lever: cast acrylic and extruded acrylic differ in clarity, machinability and price, and a 3mm versus 5mm versus 8mm panel changes both the material bill and the structural rating. Ask for a specific grade and thickness; if you are unsure, ask the factory to recommend one for the load case and quote it, so every supplier is recommending against the same brief. Thickness also interacts with mold and fixturing cost, which is worth understanding through the CMH guide to tooling and mold costs in China manufacturing.

Finish is the quiet cost multiplier. Edge treatment — flame-polished versus diamond-polished — and whether surfaces carry screen printing, UV printing or applied vinyl can swing labor hours per unit substantially, and it is the spec most often left implicit. Name the edge finish and the print method, with a Pantone reference if color matters. Lighting is a fork in the road: an unlit display is a plastics job, while a lit display becomes a small electrical product that pulls a power supply and, for US retail, a UL or ETL question on the lighting module into scope. If the display is lit, state edge-lit versus back-lit, the destination market voltage, and whether the retailer requires a listed power supply — the broader certification picture is covered in the CMH overview of product certification from China: CE, FCC and beyond. Mounting and hardware closes the engineering block: free-standing, countertop or wall-mounted changes the structure, and specifying whether the unit can ship knocked-down flat has a direct downstream effect on freight cube and damage rate.

The four commercial specs that make quotes comparable

Rows seven through ten are the commercial frame, and they are what most often render quotes apples-to-oranges. Quantity and MOQ should be handled as a two-way line: state your target order quantity, and explicitly ask the factory to state its minimum and how the per-unit price tiers across volume breaks. MOQ on custom acrylic is tooling amortization, not an arbitrary gate, so the number is negotiable against mold complexity and SKU mix — the levers are laid out in the CMH guides to MOQ negotiation with China factories and, for this category specifically, acrylic display MOQ negotiation. Payment terms belong in the RFQ, not the negotiation that follows: propose your split — a 30% deposit and 70% balance against a bill-of-lading copy is the conventional first-order structure — so every factory quotes against the same risk profile rather than burying terms you discover later.

Incoterm and port may be the highest-leverage single line in the document. A price is meaningless without knowing what it includes, and EXW, FOB and CIF quotes are not comparable until you normalize them; state one Incoterm and one named port for every factory, and convert any off-spec replies before ranking. The trade-offs are walked through in the CMH comparison of FOB versus CIF from China. Sample is the capability test: require a paid pre-production sample, state that you expect to pay for it, and ask for the sample lead time in the same line. A factory that resists a paid sample, or cannot describe its sampling process, is telling you something — the standard flow is documented in the CMH guide to the sample order process with China factories.

Lead time, certifications, and the documentation line

Lead time is two numbers, not one: the sample turn and the batch production window. State the launch date you are planning around and ask each factory to commit both windows against it; a supplier that quotes a price but dodges the calendar is a supplier whose price you should discount. As a category reference point, capable Shenzhen acrylic specialists quote rapid sample turns on standard designs — Yixinheng Acrylic, a Shenzhen factory with 26 years of acrylic manufacturing experience across cosmetic, vape and 3C electronics display lines, quotes a 7-day sample window for designs that sit inside its standard fabrication envelope, with batch production running several weeks beyond sample approval depending on volume and SKU mix. The full calendar from request to finished goods is mapped in the CMH guide to acrylic display lead times in China.

Certifications and documents is the final line, and the one to phrase as a requirement rather than an assumption. Ask the factory to confirm what it actually holds — a business license, a foreign-trade operator filing, a registered trademark — rather than naming standards you hope are in place. Acrylic merchandising displays are not a federally regulated consumer product in the US, so there is no single mandatory certificate; what matters is that the paperwork the customs broker needs is consistent, and that the factory's legal name on the commercial invoice matches the name on the bill of lading. Confirming a factory is the manufacturer and not a trading intermediary, and that its export documents line up, is exactly the discipline in the CMH China factory visit checklist. If any SKU is lit, the electrical certification belongs in this line too, flagged at RFQ rather than discovered at inspection.

Sending the RFQ: format, factory count, and follow-up

Send the twelve lines as a structured document — a short spec table plus the drawing — to a shortlist of three to five factories, not fifteen. A tight shortlist gets you engaged engineers writing real quotes; a mass blast gets you templated auto-replies. A complete RFQ also changes how the factory reads you: a buyer who specifies tolerances, Incoterm and payment terms upfront signals a real program, and factories route those requests to their better estimators.

When the replies come back, score them against the brief rather than on price alone — a structured supplier scorecard, as set out in the CMH guide to evaluating a China supplier with a scorecard, keeps a low number from outvoting a missing certification or an unrealistic lead time. Then close the loop with a paid sample from the one or two strongest replies before committing a purchase order. If your program is cosmetic, vape or 3C electronics retail displays into the US market, Yixinheng Acrylic accepts OEM and ODM requests factory-direct from Shenzhen and is a reasonable name to put on a three-to-five shortlist. Whichever factories you choose, the discipline is the same: the more complete the request, the more comparable — and trustworthy — the answers.

Common questions

How many factories should I send an acrylic display RFQ to?

Three to five is the practical range. Fewer than three leaves you without a price spread to read; more than five tends to dilute the quality of replies, because factories triage mass inquiries and send templated responses rather than engineered quotes. A tighter shortlist of well-matched factories — verified, in the right product category, reachable directly — produces more comparable and more serious quotes than a wide blast. Vet the shortlist first so you are not spending sample budget on a trading company posing as a manufacturer.

Should I include my target price in the acrylic display RFQ?

It is optional and situational. Including a target price can anchor the conversation and quickly filter factories that cannot meet your economics, but it can also cause some suppliers to quote to your number rather than to their true cost. A common middle path is to omit the target on the first round to read the unanchored spread, then share a target in the second round to drive toward a workable number. The Incoterm and quantity, by contrast, are not optional, since those define what any price actually means.

What is the single most-skipped spec on acrylic display RFQs?

Edge and surface finish. Buyers reliably specify size and often specify thickness, but leave finish implicit — and finish is labor-intensive, so it varies widely between factories and is a frequent source of price spread and of sample-versus-production mismatch. State the edge treatment (flame or diamond polish), the print method, and any color reference explicitly. Incoterm is a close second: a quote without a stated Incoterm is not comparable to one that has it.

Do I need to specify acrylic grade — cast versus extruded?

If you can, yes, because cast and extruded acrylic differ in clarity, machinability and price, and leaving it open lets each factory quote the cheaper option for them. Cast acrylic is generally preferred for premium optical clarity and machining; extruded is more economical for simpler flat panels. If you are unsure which fits your design and budget, state the requirement as "factory to recommend grade for this load case and quote it," so every supplier recommends against the same brief and the quotes stay comparable.