How to Find the Right Vendor

Rather than force you down a complicated road of nested filters, our Vendor Discovery system allows you to simply enter the type of supplier you're looking for in simple natural language form. Don't hesitate to include criteria like location and certifications to your query in order to find exactly the suppliers you need.

Writing a Good Query

Our search is backed by a powerful algorithm that will convert your query into the form that our AI vendor index understands. The algorithm can generally break the query down automatically, but there are a few of strategies that you can use to help it out along the way.

• Avoid including extraneous information. Rather than entering "I'm looking for aluminum suppliers please", try just entering "aluminum suppliers".
• Specify certifications in your search. Given the size of our index, very broad queries will result in more results than you can reasonably read through. Specifying things like location and certification in the query will greatly narrow the results down to exactly the suppliers that you need. If you need, for example, an ITAR certified machine shop near Harlan, KY then you should go ahead and specify that with a query like "itar machine shop harlan, ky".
• Directly reference the product or service that you need. Since our AI indexers are trained to understand manufacturing, you can specify specific services or products in your query. For example, if you need custom ball bearings made from DFARS compliant material, you'd enter "dfars ball bearing manufacturer". Similarly, if you need off-the-shelf ball bearings in high volumes, you could enter "dfars ball bearing suppliers".

How Results Are Ranked

Suppliers are ranked solely based on relevancy to your original query. If you included a location in your search - "cnc machine shops in harlan, ky", for example - then the results are ordered based on both relevancy and proximity to the location you entered.

Relevancy, in this case, is a calculated metric based on a number of public and private data points that we ingest each day. Validated certifications, public and private contract data, and the supplier's own marketing data are all considered in real-time during the ranking process.

To preserve the purity of our vendor search engine, we do not allow suppliers to pay to manipulate their ranking on the platform. We strongly believe that this approach delivers a higher quality set of results, surfacing smaller vendors alongside the big players in each market.

Available Supplier Data

Though we are continuously adding more fields, our supplier profile data covers most fields that are commonly used in sourcing.

Currently, we provide the following fields:

• Locations that the supplier operates. We try to include all locations including headquarters and various plants around the country.
• Contact information including website URL, phone number, and email address that you can use to get your quote.
• Certifications that the supplier has. Some certifications are verified by an independent agency and others are simply self-certified.

Still got questions? Contact Us or Book a Demo to learn more about how Purchaser can fit into your workflow.