It feels like every window and door business right now is asking the same question – is the market really getting harder, or does it just feel that way?
Being a data-driven business, EndtoEnd IT decided to dive into our window and door software, integrate, to see what the numbers are telling us. Read on to find out what’s really happening and where your business should focus to beat the competition…
The market isn’t doing anyone favours
EndtoEnd works with many businesses in the window and door industry, from smaller start-ups to family-inherited firms to market-leading organisations, so we have plenty of real data to draw from.
This month we pulled anonymised order data from a sample of businesses using integrate, comparing January to July 2025 against the same period in 2026, to find out what’s really going on.
Nobody needs telling trading conditions are tough right now. Demand hasn’t collapsed, but it isn’t buoyant either. It feels a bit flat, and flat markets are inherently competitive ones almost by definition. When nobody has more work than they can handle, customers have the time and the leverage to shop around, collect multiple quotes, and negotiate before committing to anyone.
That combination, steady demand and more comparison shopping ultimately rewards the businesses that can respond faster, present themselves better, and have a clear view of their margins.
What the data shows
We looked at how long it took a lead to convert into an order across the first seven months of 2026 compared to the same period in 2025, and at how order volumes moved over the same period.
| Metric | Change |
|---|---|
| Total order volume | -1% |
|
Commercial: avg. days to convert |
-7% |
|
Domestic: avg. days to convert |
+9% |
Three things stood out:
- Overall order volume held close to flat: down around 1%
- Commercial conversion times got faster, down around 7%, from roughly 152 days to 141 days on average
- Domestic conversion times went the other way, slowing by around 9%, from roughly 167 days to 182 days on average
Put simply, bigger, business-to-business jobs are moving through the pipeline more quickly, while smaller residential quotes are taking noticeably longer to turn into orders than they did a year ago, all within a market that’s neither growing nor shrinking overall.
That split matters more than a single blended average. Individual businesses varied hugely, some far faster than a year ago, others far slower, and averaged out across the sample, conversion times moved by around 6%. But that average hides the real story: the split above.
integrate drawing board
So what does this tell us?
Three things stand out as the factors separating businesses pulling ahead from the ones standing still: how well you stand out, how well you know your numbers, and how fast you move.
1. Standing out matters
When a customer is comparing three or four quotes rather than picking the first business through the door, the quote itself becomes part of the pitch, not just a price on a page.
A professional, branded, easy-to-understand quote signals competence before a single window has even been manufactured, let alone fitted. It’s the equivalent to a great CV, while you and the next candidate may have similar skills, what can you do to make yourself be picked over and above the rest. In a market where trust and first impressions decide close rates as much as price does, looking like you know what you’re doing is most of the way to proving it.
This is why so many businesses start with integrateCONNECT for quoting and winning business – within one space you can design windows and doors using our drawing board feature, calculate details and cost information (see how to price a timber window), and pull the information through into a branded quote in minutes.
integrate quote proposal preview
2. Speed is a differentiator
While the volume of business isn’t growing currently, the volume of requests for quotes IS increasing, as savvier customers seek more comparisons. Not only are you playing a ‘pick-me’ game, time really is of the essence.
The domestic and commercial split above suggests commercial customers, likely under their own pressure to get projects moving, are making decisions faster than before.
Homeowners, meanwhile, are taking their time, weighing up more options and more quotes before committing to anyone. If that reading is right, speed and responsiveness aren’t a nice-to-have, they’re what separates the businesses winning those slower-moving deals from the ones quietly losing them to a faster competitor who followed up first.
It’s early days. This is one seven-month period compared with another, not yet a confirmed trend, but the direction is clear enough to start acting on now rather than waiting for more evidence.
For a business to be able to churn out quotes fast enough, you need a system where everything is working for you, not against you. That means instead of creating a CAD drawing, noting details on a spreadsheet and creating a quote in Word you need something which can do all of this systematically because it takes TIME.
Saving half an hour per quote might not sound revolutionary. But when we analysed the data across all our clients, we discovered that this seemingly small time-saving figure using integrate added up to 1,179 full days of time saved in one year alone.
integrate price file editor
3. Know your numbers, or the market will find them for you
The flip side of a more competitive market is discounting pressure, the undercutting race to the bottom.
Every customer with three quotes on the table will ask for a better price at some point, and businesses without a clear, real-time view of their margins are most likely to say yes to a discount they can’t afford.
Software that tracks true costs and margins as quotes go out, rather than finding out the damage at month-end on a spreadsheet that doesn’t add up, means you can hold a firm line on price with confidence instead of guessing where the floor is.
There’s nowhere to hide from the numbers, which is exactly the point of having them in front of you. Not only does this mean you can save time negotiating on a job which is going to cost you money, it means you can more confidently predict your pipeline (see here for more information on profit forecasting) so you can steer your ship in the right direction, rather than be reactive and find yourself sinking.
End to End IT team
Three’s the magic number
None of these three things works especially well in isolation.
- A beautifully branded quote won’t save your margin if you don’t know your true costs.
- Knowing your numbers won’t win you the job if a competitor gets their quote in front of the customer first.
- Speed without professionalism or pricing discipline just means making bad decisions faster than everyone else.
The businesses best set up to grow through a flat market are the ones doing all three at once: standing out, knowing their numbers, and moving quickly, backed by a system that makes each of those easier rather than harder to keep on top of.
That’s precisely what integrate is built to do: give window and door businesses one place to quote professionally, see their real margins on every job, and move fast enough to seal the deal before someone else does.
Whether you’re new to the industry or you’ve been around for decades, get in touch and talk to us about growing your business with software that actually understands what you do, and if you’d like to see how it could work for you, see integrate in action.