Resources Case study
Inside an EU sourcing search
A composite search, anonymised: one plain sentence to a qualified shortlist with reasons to a signed order draft, in an afternoon. The shape a search is meant to take.
An illustrative walkthrough. The buyer below is a composite I've anonymised, not a named customer, and the suppliers are the sample set from our product mockups. It's here to show the shape a search is meant to take, step by step.
The buyer had forty-odd company names in a spreadsheet and no way to tell which ones were real. Two evenings gone: one in a search engine, one arguing with a chat assistant that kept inventing suppliers with confident names and no websites. A small hardware firm, needed an aluminium enclosure for a new outdoor product, around 5,000 units a month, weatherproof, ideally an EU plant so the lead times didn't run through a port. Here's the same job on ZoraMatch.
A search engine
Forty-odd company names in a spreadsheet, and no quick way to tell a real factory from a reseller with a nice homepage.
A chat assistant
Confident supplier names, invented on the spot, half of them with no website behind them.
The same job, on ZoraMatch
One sentence in. What follows is the log, from the typed need to a draft you could sign.
They typed it, they didn't fill a form
No fields. They wrote what they needed in a sentence: "an aluminium enclosure, about 5,000 a month, has to be weatherproof for outdoor use, EU supplier preferred." Zora asked two follow-ups, and only where the answer would change who fit: the ingress rating they needed (IP65 versus IP67 changes the tooling), and whether 5,000 was steady or a seasonal spike. Ninety seconds. No account needed to start.
I've sat through the version of this that takes a fortnight of email. This part is the fortnight, compressed.
The sentence becomes a filter
Behind that little chat, the conversation turned into a structured brief, and the brief turned into hard filters: capability, region, the certifications named, capacity at or above 5,000 a month, MOQ at or below it. This pass is absolute and completely unglamorous. Any plant that genuinely can't do the job is gone before a single supplier gets ranked, so nobody wastes a call on a mismatch that was never going to work. Two of the forty names in that spreadsheet were trading companies reselling the same housings at a markup. The capability filter dropped both before either could send a quote.
A shortlist, and why each name is on it
Only now does ranking happen: text relevance first, then an AI re-ranker that reads the brief against every plant that survived the filter. What comes back is short and ordered, and every line carries a plain reason it's there.
- ProManufacturing B.V., Eindhoven. Injection moulding and CNC, ISO 9001. "Handles aluminium enclosures at your volume with room to spare."
- MetalForm Solutions, Ostend. Sheet metal and laser cutting. "Strong on weatherproof housings; MOQ sits comfortably under your run."
Handles aluminium enclosures at your volume with room to spare.
Strong on weatherproof housings; MOQ sits comfortably under your run.
The reasons are the point. Our buyer isn't squinting at a wall of logos trying to guess which one is a real factory and which is a reseller with a nice homepage. They can see why each name made the cut.
Closing it without losing the thread
They pick one and open a workspace. On one side, an ordinary chat with the supplier. On the other, a live order draft that updates as terms land: unit price, volume, lead time, the certifications, the Incoterms. The supplier came back on MOQ, wanted 2,000 minimum, and the draft showed the new figure the second it was agreed, with the old one parked in the version history where either side could check it. Every version is kept, and there's a one-click PDF the moment both sides are happy. This is the bit that normally sprawls across a dozen emails and a spreadsheet nobody remembers to save. Here it's one document that always shows the current state, so there's no "which version were we on" argument three weeks later.
From a sentence to a signed draft
The shape of every search
Those two evenings turned into a described need and a shortlist that explained itself. From there, a draft structured enough to sign. That's the shape of every search on the platform, whether you're sourcing enclosures or 60 kg an hour of something on a food-grade line.
The whole thing starts with a brief that pulls its weight. If you want yours to, read How to brief a manufacturer.
