How to brief a sourcing agent, and how to tell one from a listing scraper

The failure pattern, so you recognise it before you have paid twice

It runs like this. You have a specific requirement, usually a capability rather than a product: a particular coating process, a piece of test equipment on site, a material certification, a tolerance. You pay a few hundred pounds. Back comes a spreadsheet of factory names with a unit price against each, no full addresses, no named contacts, and at least one name that plainly makes something else entirely. You ask the only question that matters, which is whether the capability was confirmed, and you get three words back, or a change of subject.

That is not a bad agent doing sourcing badly. It is a different service being sold under the same word. What was delivered is a search of a business-to-business platform, filtered by keyword, and anyone can produce it in twenty minutes without leaving their desk. The unit prices attached to it are list prices for products you have not specified yet, which is why they can be quoted before anything is agreed.

The reason it happens so reliably at the low end is arithmetic rather than character. A fee of a hundred or two hundred pounds cannot contain a factory visit, a phone call in Mandarin to a production manager, or the hours it takes to get a straight answer out of a sales office that would rather say yes. What the fee can contain is a search and a spreadsheet, so that is what it contains. Price does not tell you the quality of the work; it tells you which work is possible.

One question separates the two, and it is not about price

Ask a closed question about a specific factory on the list, whose answer requires that someone actually spoke to them. Not "can they do PVD coating" but "do they have a PVD line on site, or do they subcontract it, and who told you that". Then ask the follow-up: what is the name and position of the person who said so, and when.

A scraper cannot answer that, because the answer does not exist on a listing page. You will get vagueness, a promise to check, a longer list, or silence. Someone who has done the work answers in a sentence, tells you which factories said no, and often volunteers that the third one on the list was ruled out because the coating is done by a supplier two towns away.

The test works because it is falsifiable. Most questions a buyer asks an agent are not: "are they a good factory", "is this a fair price", "can they handle our volume" all invite a confident yes from anyone. The closed question about a named fact, with a source attached, cannot be answered confidently by someone who has not asked it.

Run the test early, on a small paid task, before the relationship is worth anything. A trial that costs you a week is a trial; a trial that costs you a production run is not.

Write the brief so that it can be failed

A brief that cannot be failed cannot be fulfilled either, because nothing in it distinguishes a good answer from a bad one. Most briefs are of that kind: they name a product, a rough quantity and a target price, and ask for suppliers. Every possible response satisfies them.

Write the capability rather than the category. "Brassware manufacturer" is a category and returns the whole platform. "Brass component manufacturer with physical vapour deposition on site and a spectrophotometer for colour measurement in their own quality lab" is a capability, and most of the platform fails it immediately, which is the point.

Then say what evidence you will accept, in advance, because an agent who knows the standard can meet it and one who does not will guess. Photographs of the equipment with the factory's signage visible, the name and position of the person who confirmed it, the machine's make, whether the process is in-house or subcontracted, and a sample produced on that equipment rather than a catalogue sample from somewhere else.

Finally, say what a negative answer looks like and that you will pay for it. "We contacted eleven factories, four claimed the capability, two had it, and here is why the other two do not" is a successful assignment. If the only outcome you will accept is a list of suppliers, you have told the agent that inventing one is safer than reporting that the requirement is rare.

Where the money comes from decides whose side they are on

Ask any agent how they are paid, and keep asking until the answer is a number rather than a reassurance. There are only a few possibilities, and each creates a different incentive.

A fee paid by you, disclosed, aligns the agent with your interest in a lower unit price, because their income does not move with it. A commission taken from the factory does the opposite, and it is usually invisible: the buyer sees a helpful free service and a price that is already carrying it. A margin inside the unit price can be either, depending entirely on whether it is disclosed, which is why the question to ask is not what the fee is but what else they receive.

The zero-fee model deserves particular care, and we say that as somebody who charges no sourcing fee. Ours comes out of the unit price and we say so on the pricing page rather than leaving you to find out; what matters is not the label but whether the arrangement is stated. An agent who takes an undisclosed commission from the supplier is working for the supplier while presenting as working for you, and the first sign of it is usually an unexplained enthusiasm for one particular factory.

Our guide on sourcing agent cost sets out the models in more detail, and the comparison with wholesalers and platforms covers where an agent is the wrong tool entirely.

What a real shortlist looks like when it arrives

Short. Three or four factories investigated properly is worth more than thirty found by keyword, and an agent who returns thirty has told you they filtered nothing.

For each one: the full registered name and address, not a trading name; what they actually make, including whether your product is core business or a favour they will fit around it; the capability confirmed or not confirmed, with the source; whether the process is in-house; the name and position of the person spoken to; and what they said about minimum quantity and tooling rather than a unit price for an unspecified product.

And a paragraph on what was ruled out and why. That paragraph is the part you are actually buying, because it is the only part that could not have been produced without doing the work, and it is the part that tells you whether the requirement is rare, expensive or simply misunderstood. A shortlist with no rejections is a search result wearing a report's clothes.

Once a factory is on the list, the work shifts to whether it can hold a standard rather than whether it has one, which is the subject of the factory audit checklist and, for the sample stage, minimum orders and sampling.

When you do not need an agent at all

If you are buying a catalogue product that exists in the form you want it, from a category with many capable makers, at a quantity a factory will run without tooling, then the difficulty is verification and logistics rather than finding, and the money is better spent on inspection than on search.

You need someone doing this work when the requirement is a capability rather than a product, when the thing you want does not exist yet, when a wrong factory costs a tooling bill, or when the distance between what a sales office says and what a production floor does is the risk you are actually carrying.

That is an honest boundary, and it is also the test of the person you are talking to. Anyone who tells you that you need an agent for every purchase has told you something about their business model rather than about yours.