Inventory Scouts turns supplier sourcing into a product
A sourcing service launches, credit-checking wholesale suppliers before listing them for resale businesses.
Inventory Scouts launched in 2013, offering resale businesses a vetted set of wholesale suppliers. Its distinguishing feature was that suppliers were credit-checked before they were listed.
The company was by this point running a wholesale operation of its own and had learned the specific way that sourcing fails: not usually through fraud but through a supplier that cannot fulfil, ships late, or disappears mid-relationship. A credit check is an imperfect predictor of all three and a considerably better one than nothing, and no directory of suppliers was performing it. The product was therefore not the list. It was the check applied to the list, sold to the side of the market that carried the risk of getting it wrong, which is the same structure as the auction directory and the graded liquidation floor.