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 for the size of their catalogue, never for a sale: the first 90 days are free, up to 500 active listings stay free for good, larger catalogues are on a monthly plan, and there is no commission on any order. Being matched and quoting cost nothing. 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 the money to flow through us, and handling payments 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. The obsolescence guide explains what each lifecycle status means.
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 have a process, and buyers are not alone
If a part arrives that is not what was quoted, the quote is the record. There is a dispute process rather than an email into the void, and an admin steps in if the supplier does not reply within 7 days. Reviews come only from buyers who actually transacted through a quote, and suppliers may reply to them but not remove them. The trust page shows how verification and reviews work.
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 every offer and supplier page, or the contact page, reaches a person, and the answer will be either a fix or a public amendment to this list.