A marketplace is a set of promises about how it behaves when nobody is watching. Here are ours, written down so they can be held against us.
1. Ranking is not for sale
Search results and category listings are ordered by relevance and availability. No supplier can buy a position in them.
We expect to sell advertising eventually — promoted placements, category sponsorships — and when we do, two things will be true: every paid slot will be labelled as such on the page, and the organic results underneath it will be ordered by exactly the rules they are ordered by today. A marketplace that quietly re-ranks for money is worth nothing to the buyers whose attention it is selling.
2. We do not take a cut of the transaction
Buyers pay nothing. Suppliers pay nothing to list, nothing to be matched and nothing to quote. The order happens directly between the two parties, on the supplier's terms and invoice.
This is partly principle and partly arithmetic: a commission model requires us to sit inside the payment, and sitting inside the payment in B2B industrial supply — with net-30 terms, partial deliveries, credit checks and returns — would make us a worse version of something the parties already do well. We would rather be very good at the introduction.
3. A supplier's stock list is theirs
We use a supplier's feed to publish their offers and to match their offers to requests. We do not sell it, we do not license it to third parties, and we do not use one supplier's prices to help a competitor undercut them.
Aggregate, anonymised statistics — how many suppliers stock a brand, how prices in a category move — are ours to publish, and we will, because they make the market legible. Nothing that identifies one supplier's position is included.
4. We say what we know and admit what we do not
Every lifecycle claim on a part page carries its trust level: official when the manufacturer published it with a link, verified when an operator checked it by hand and recorded what they checked, community when it came from a supplier or a buyer, AI when it was proposed by a model and not yet confirmed. AI-proposed relationships are never shown as verified, and they are labelled where they appear.
Stock figures carry the date the supplier last published them. Response rates are measured on this platform, not supplied by the supplier. Where we do not have data, the page says so rather than showing a plausible blank.
5. Disputes are visible and buyers are not alone
If a part arrives that is not what was quoted, the quote is the record, and there is a dispute process rather than an e-mail into the void. Outcomes feed the supplier's public profile. Reviews come only from buyers who actually transacted through a quote, and suppliers may reply to them but not remove them.
The corollary: a supplier's page will sometimes show something they would prefer it did not. That is what makes the rest of the page worth reading.
6. Both sides are customers
It is easy for a marketplace to decide that one side is the customer and the other is inventory. Supply in industrial spares is scarce and fragmented; buyers are unpredictable and urgent. Neither works without the other.
In practice that means: suppliers keep control of what they publish and to whom they ship; buyers are never charged and never gated behind a login to see a price; and when the two sides' interests genuinely conflict — as they do over price transparency — we say which way we went and why, rather than pretending there was no conflict.
Holding us to it
These are on a page with a date on it. If you find us doing something that contradicts one of them, the report button on any page reaches a person, and the answer will be either a fix or a public amendment to this list.