Supply Engine Wiki

The Supply Engine is not a purely agentic system. Agentic systems tend to struggle with reliability because their probabilistic outputs lead to worsening errors over time. We chose a different system architecture to mitigate this problem.

Our system is better described as a highly modular deep automation. Instead of using a one size fits all approach, it employs nearly 100 specialized modules for statistical analysis, online scraping, text analysis, website navigation, and verification.

Most of our research modules produce deterministic outputs. We use non-deterministic modules sparingly and improve their reliability with a variety of methods. The Supply Engine can find quality leads with relatively few false positives.

The Supply Engine isn’t something you will sit down and constantly use like a tool or a dashboard. In fact, there are only two times you ever need to interact with it:

1. When specifying your search criteria, which tells the Supply Engine what to look for. You can accomplish this by filling out your criteria form. Signing up on our website will redirect you to this form automatically. You can also find your criteria form link at the bottom of every email we send you.

2. When opening your weekly email and downloading a new batch of leads. Once per week, we will send you an email with a unique link. Clicking on this link will let you download a new batch of leads in a spreadsheet (xslx file).

Otherwise, the Supply Engine is fully hands-free. Day after day, it will perform customized research before emailing you a weekly batch of leads. This invisible work hides a significant amount going on. For any given person, the Supply Engine may evaluate thousands of products and dig through hundreds of supplier websites to finish a weekly batch.

Part of what affects a seller’s research has nothing to do with the product itself. Shipping costs, prep center fees, and the types of items a seller is willing to carry also factor into whether a lead is worth pursuing.

Your criteria form includes a small group of settings that capture these details. Rather than acting as strict filters, these values are more like rules of thumb that the Supply Engine keeps in mind as it researches on your behalf.

Not every seller on a listing is a real competitor. How closely they hug the buy box and how they fulfill orders are weighted heavily, but your own account metrics also affect how vulnerable you are to those competitors. Most sellers learn who they can safely ignore through trial and error. Your criteria form lets you specify how broadly the Supply Engine should count competitors when doing your research.

Some product characteristics don’t change over time, like a product’s weight, category, and whether it contains hazardous materials. Sellers typically check for these static details by reading titles and descriptions on Amazon or filtering out categories with tools like Jungle Scout. Your personalized form includes criteria for each of these, which the Supply Engine checks on your behalf.

Not all product characteristics stay the same over time. A product’s price, buy box ownership, and number of offers vary daily, while monthly revenue and sales velocity change more gradually. Sellers spend a lot of time evaluating these characteristics by hand, scanning Keepa charts for pricing history and checking offer pages to see who else is selling. Your criteria form includes detailed settings for these dynamic characteristics so the Supply Engine knows what to look for.

Many sellers care about who is on a listing. Competitors like Amazon or the brand itself affect whether a product is worth pursuing, but sellers have varying beliefs. Your criteria form includes settings that specify which competitors the Supply Engine should avoid.

The Supply Engine searches online for legitimate suppliers where you can open wholesale accounts. Your criteria form instructs the Supply Engine whether to find wholesale distributors, small brands, or both.

The Supply Engine discovers products and suppliers on your behalf. After you submit your personalized criteria form, it will begin researching autonomously throughout the week, finding products on Amazon, analyzing their pricing history, checking the competition, and searching online for suppliers. It will email you a new batch of leads every week.

We give every user a unique criteria form. We try to make this form easy to access by including your unique link at the bottom of every email, including:

1. Your initial onboarding email.

2. Each email containing your weekly batch of leads.

Every email also includes a link to our feedback form, and a link to this wiki.

Just click on your unique link to access your criteria form. Toggle various settings to control how the Supply Engine does your research. When you submit your criteria form, your newer selections will overwrite any previous ones.

At this time, you must resubmit your whole form to update any part of it. This is a temporary inconvenience that we plan to solve in the future. Ideally, you shouldn’t have to resubmit your whole form just to update one criterion within it.

The Supply Engine continuously researches your leads throughout the week. If you update your criteria form partway through this process, any leads already discovered prior to your update will follow your old criteria, whereas leads discovered afterwards will reflect your new criteria. This means your next batch may contain a mix of both.

Unlike the other settings, changes to your Supply Engine email address will take effect right away. We will always send your new batches of leads to the most recent email address we have on file.

The criteria form as it exists today is just a starting point. We are continually expanding it with new settings, and over time we hope to cover virtually any preference a seller might care about. Early examples include more specific competitor filtering, the ability to exclude well-known marketplace sellers from your results, and support for targeting specific countries. These are far from the only additions we have planned.

Much of what we add will be determined by feedback from sellers like you, and the number of settings available on your form will grow as we continue building out the Supply Engine. Every email includes a link to a feedback form because we want your suggestions.

There are two different email addresses with different purposes. Updating one will not affect the other:

The number of leads you will receive varies by plan. The $49 plan comes with roughly 100 leads per month (25 per week), the $99 plan comes with roughly 200 leads per month (50 per week), and the $249 plan comes with roughly 500 leads per month (125 per week).

Every plan comes with a free trial (except for the enterprise plan), so the plan you select should be based upon your needs as a business.

The $99 plan is a good starting point for most new sellers. Sourcing is a numbers game, and newer sellers tend to spend a large amount of their time reaching out to open wholesale accounts. Having more leads each week means more opportunities to work with, and once you get in with a supplier, especially a smaller distributor, you can often find multiple products worth selling through a single relationship.

The $49 plan works well for sellers who prefer a smaller volume or have less time for outreach, and the $249 plan is better suited for larger businesses that can handle a higher volume of leads.

Your first batch of leads will arrive one week after you sign up. For example, if you sign up on a Tuesday, your first batch will arrive the following Tuesday. After that, a new batch will arrive every Tuesday.

A lead is a unique product-supplier combination that the Supply Engine has discovered and vetted for you. More specifically, each lead contains information about a product found on Amazon that meets your criteria, along with information about a supplier (either an authorized distributor or a small brand, depending on your settings).

Because each lead is a unique product-supplier combination, the same product at a different supplier or a different product at the same supplier will count as separate leads. When the Supply Engine finds multiple variants of a product at the same supplier, only one will count as a unique lead. The Supply Engine will still send you the rest but will not count them toward your total.

Each lead includes four sections:

1. Information about the product, including its unique identifiers (UPC, EAN, ASIN), brand, title, description, and a link to the listing on Amazon.

2. Information about the supplier, including their website or any contact information the Supply Engine located.

3. A statistical overview that shows how this product measured up against your criteria.

4. A step-by-step summary that walks through exactly how the Supply Engine discovered and vetted both the product and the supplier.

Each week, the Supply Engine will send you an email with a link to download your latest batch of leads. Clicking this link will download a spreadsheet (xlsx file) containing your leads for that week. Each download link will expire after 30 days.

Start by checking your spam folder for the email with your weekly batch of leads. If you find it, move it out of your spam folder so that future emails will be delivered to your inbox.

If your weekly batch is not in your spam folder, look for the email that the Supply Engine sent when you signed up. This is different from the sign-up email that Stripe sent you. The criteria form email contains a unique link to your personalized criteria form, where you can resubmit your criteria with the correct email address.

If you still cannot find your criteria form link, go to your customer portal on Stripe to cancel your current subscription. Every email we send you includes a link to your customer portal. Once cancelled, sign up again and you will receive a new account with a fresh criteria form link. You should unlock a new free trial.

The Supply Engine uses several dozen modules to analyze products. Most of them are deterministic, so they use traditional calculations and statistics to spot products. The product information in your leads is therefore very accurate.

Supplier websites are harder to analyze. They vary in structure, terminology, and how they describe themselves. A page could mention a brand casually, as part of someone’s name, or in a blog post without supplying that brand. A regional distributor may reference the tri-state area instead of listing an address. Even a “contact us” URL can lead to a page limited to returns or legal matters while a nondescript page has the contact form.

We’ve tested the Supply Engine against real websites to achieve an accuracy level of roughly 90% (low false positives rate). Nevertheless, the Supply Engine currently sends about 10% more leads than your plan includes so you still receive at least as many accurate leads as you are paying for.

The most common reason a download link stops working is that it has expired. We give you 30 days to download each batch, after which we delete the files on our end because every batch is researched from scratch and we only send fresh data. If your link has expired, those leads are no longer available, but a new batch arrives every week so you will have more recent ones to download.

You can update your criteria at any time by visiting your personalized criteria form. This link is included in your onboarding email and at the bottom of every email we send you. Whenever you submit the form, your new selections will overwrite your previous criteria.

Your free trial lasts 15 days instead of the typical 14. We chose 15 days so you have time to review two full batches of leads before being charged. With a 14-day trial, your second batch would arrive the same day you get charged. The extra day gives you a chance to look at that second batch and decide if the Supply Engine is valuable for your business before your subscription begins.

Your first charge will occur 15 days after you sign up, when your free trial ends. After that, you will be charged monthly on that same date. Basing your billing cycle on when your free trial ends ensures you always get a full month of leads between charges. If billing were tied to a fixed calendar day, signing up at the wrong time could result in a charge before you have received a full month of leads.

Stripe controls your payment method. You can update your payment method from your customer portal on Stripe, which is linked at the bottom of every Stripe invoice email.

You can cancel your subscription at any time through your customer portal on Stripe. Every invoicing email that Stripe sends includes a link to your customer portal.

You can upgrade or downgrade your plan at any time. Every invoicing email that Stripe sends will include a link to your customer portal, where you can switch plans. When you switch plans, Stripe will adjust your billing accordingly.

Pausing is not available at this time, but you can cancel your subscription through your customer portal on Stripe and resubscribe whenever you are ready. You can find a link to your customer portal at the bottom of any invoicing email from Stripe.

The Supply Engine won’t send you the same product-supplier combination more than once within a three-month window. This also applies to variants of the same product at the same supplier. After three months, a lead may come back because circumstances change. For example, a supplier that was previously out of stock may have the product available again. If you feel this window should be longer or shorter, let us know through the feedback form. This is a setting we can easily adjust on our end.

The Supply Engine does not pull from a central database or direct everyone toward the same pool of leads. It runs an open search from scratch for each user, exploring the full variety of sources you might visit when sourcing by hand.

This means your leads are completely independent from what we send other users. Statistically, some overlap may still occur by random chance, the same way two people researching independently might stumble on the same product at the same supplier.

This is one of the core features that makes the Supply Engine different from prior methods. Lead lists, distributor registries, and other tools funnel a large number of resellers toward the same few sources. If we had taken a shortcut by selecting a few opportunities by hand, or built a less sophisticated system that was incapable of open-ended research, it would be like sending everyone to the same water fountain. Because we invested in building the technology for genuine open-ended research, we’ve unlocked the ability to give every user their own fountain.

Every email we send you includes a link to our feedback form. We review every piece of feedback we receive. Much of what we hear is requests for new criteria, which translate into new modules that the Supply Engine uses when researching on your behalf.

Because the Supply Engine is highly modular, we can add new criteria and capabilities relatively quickly. Our job is less about coming up with ideas ourselves and more about listening to what our users suggest, narrowing down what belongs as part of a cohesive sourcing engine, and carefully building and testing those modules.

Several features in the Supply Engine today came directly from user suggestions. Not counting variants as full leads, the step-by-step breakdown of how each lead was discovered and vetted, and the filtering out of suppliers that market themselves as Amazon-focused are all things that users asked us to implement.

You can also share feedback by filling out our form at this link (it's only three questions):

https://form.jotform.com/261408095819060

Your criteria form link does not expire. You can find it in your onboarding email and at the bottom of every email we send you. You can submit your criteria whenever you are ready, and the Supply Engine will begin researching on your behalf once you do.

Keep in mind that your free trial starts when you sign up through Stripe, not when you submit your criteria form, so waiting will reduce the number of batches you receive during your trial.

Accurately estimating monthly sales and revenue requires using several different methods. The Supply Engine begins by figuring out how many units a product sells per month. Our system ranks several methods by how well they predict sales. When two methods disagree, the more reliable one wins.

The most reliable of these methods is based upon Amazon’s own public-facing data. Some product pages on Amazon display how many units sell per month. The Supply Engine uses customer-facing data when available because they come straight from Amazon and have the implicit burden of being non-deceptive.

Our system falls back on indirect methods when Amazon doesn’t display this information. A convenient but less reliable method tracks how often a product’s sales rank (BSR) drops per month. Each drop typically indicates a sale. This approach produces accurate results for products that sell frequently enough to interest wholesale buyers, but it has two limitations:

1. Third-party data brokers don’t appear to frequently sample BSR values for products with infrequent sales. This is a cost optimization that creates a kind of reporting bias, which underestimates sales rank drops for many “slower” products.

2. Multi-pack sales appear to register as a single BSR drop regardless of how many units are in an order.

Sales volume is still only part of the picture. The Supply Engine must also estimate the future selling price, which is more difficult. Our system doesn’t rely on the current buy box price because that value fluctuates. Following the price trend isn’t sufficient either because superficial trends ignore the underlying, driving factors of price.

Instead, the Supply Engine identifies those factors (like the number of competitors on a listing) and predicts whether each factor is strengthening or weakening. Our system then looks for a historical period where those predicted conditions also occurred and uses those values as an empirical precedent (reality is the best simulator). When the right historical data aren’t available, our system uses other methods to estimate a future price.

The Supply Engine switches between methods depending upon what information is available, and uses these values to predict the total monthly revenue and your share of it.

The Supply Engine does not currently support targeting specific products, brands, or categories. Right now, it chooses which products to research based on the preferences you set in your personalized criteria form.

We plan to add the ability to target specific products, brands, or categories in your criteria form. We also plan to let you filter out certain brands by name so the Supply Engine skips products from those brands entirely.

If either of these capabilities is important to you, let us know through the feedback form included in every email. Feedback from sellers like you decides most of what we build.

Most of the suppliers in your leads will be authorized distributors because they are the brand itself or are an established distributor that carries products from many brands. Statistically, a distributor that allows you to open wholesale or bulk accounts and lists many brands on its website is usually authorized to sell the products it carries.

However, not every supplier makes authorization easy to confirm. Some distributors do not clearly state whether they are authorized on their website, and the only way to find out is to call them. Others may be deceptive. No matter how rigorously we test our systems, the Supply Engine can still make mistakes in these cases.

The Supply Engine cuts down a significant amount of the grunt work that goes into sourcing, but you will still need to reach out to suppliers and open accounts yourself. Part of this process will likely involve confirming whether a supplier is authorized by the brands they carry.

The Supply Engine does not currently support filtering out specific brands by name. The ability to exclude brands from your results is one of the settings we are looking at adding to the criteria form as we continue to build out our systems.

The Supply Engine sends each batch of leads as a single xlsx file. We use xlsx because it is the most widely compatible spreadsheet format, so you can open your batch in Excel, Google Sheets, or any other spreadsheet application.

The Supply Engine does not check if a product is in a gated category before sending you a corresponding lead. To get ungated in a new category, most sellers need to provide Amazon with an invoice from an authorized distributor for a sufficient quantity of products in that category. Your leads connect you with suppliers who can provide those invoices, so filtering out products in gated categories would actually work against you.

If you want to avoid certain categories for other reasons, your criteria form lets you exclude up to three categories. Some sellers avoid clothing because of its high return rate. Others avoid electronics because returns on expensive items have a greater financial impact on their business. Some avoid toys because many of the larger toy brands only work with a handful of large national distributors, which makes it harder to find smaller and less competitive toy distributors.

The Supply Engine does not check whether a product listing has a history of IP complaints before sending you a corresponding lead. IP complaints on Amazon are primarily filed against unauthorized sellers, and wholesale sourcing means buying through authorized and legitimate channels.

If you purchase from an authorized distributor, you will have the invoices needed to strike down an IP complaint through Amazon. If you purchase directly from a brand, you can reach out to them to resolve the complaint because you already have a relationship with them.

Brands that actively file IP complaints against unauthorized sellers on their listings actually help thin out unauthorized competition, which benefits you as a legitimate seller.

The Supply Engine doesn't yet have a direct filter for seasonal patterns. Your criteria form does include a setting for the lowest historical buy box price, which can indirectly filter out seasonal products.

For seasonal products, the buy box price tends to drop during certain times of the year. This is because the product may become easier to source as supply increases, or demand may decrease. If you set a minimum floor price and choose a look-back window that covers a full seasonal cycle (such as a year), the Supply Engine will reject any product whose buy box price dropped below your floor during that time.

We're also looking into adding more direct ways of detecting seasonal patterns, or avoiding products with highly seasonal sales.

Each week, the Supply Engine sends an email to the address you specify on your criteria form. That email contains a link to download your latest batch of leads. The download link doesn't require a login or any special access to use, so you can forward the email or share the link with anyone on your team.

We don't currently offer annual billing. All plans bill monthly through Stripe. How quickly you need to generate leads can change over time, and monthly billing gives you the flexibility to adjust your plan as your needs change without locking you into a longer commitment.

The Supply Engine currently only sources leads on Amazon. Amazon is the largest marketplace, so we started there. Adding Walmart and eBay support is on our roadmap, but the Supply Engine doesn't yet have that capability.