Who qualifies, and how your data is handled

Two questions decide whether an application is worth making: does your buying situation match what an account is for, and what happens to the information you hand over. Both belong before the form rather than after it, because both change whether you should fill the form in at all.

Who qualifies, and who does not

An account exists to make a buying requirement priceable. It is not a membership tier and it does not unlock content as a reward — it unlocks the fields a factory marks as sensitive, which are the reference price, the MOQ at your quantity, and the lead time for your specification. That is why the qualification test is about the requirement, not about the size of the buyer.

The refusals are specific rather than discretionary. A record in this directory is a claim we have checked, and the price fields are the part a factory is least willing to publish openly. An account that hands those to an unverifiable applicant would spend the one thing the directory is built on. If an application is declined, we say which criterion was not met, and the usual answer is one of the four in the right-hand column — you can reapply once the missing piece exists.

What you are agreeing to when you apply

Three things, and none of them is a subscription.

Your enquiry goes to the factories we match for that requirement and nowhere else. It is not used as a demand signal to factories you did not ask us to approach, and it is not pooled with other buyers to negotiate a better price — a promise that would sound generous and would in fact make your specification public.

Marketing requires a separate opt-in. A trade account is not consent to a mailing list, and the two are collected separately so that declining one does not cost you the other.

Your company data is used to answer your enquiry and to run the verification match. How it is stored, how long it is kept and how to have it removed are set out in the privacy notice, which is written to be read rather than to be survived.

What qualifies an account in numbers

Where an application sits between the two columns above, the deciding detail is usually quantity and destination. A first enquiry with a stated quantity, a target market and a product family can be worked with, because those three facts are what a factory needs before it will quote. An enquiry without them produces a reply that asks for them, which wastes the one round trip an account exists to avoid.

That is also why applications from the same company are approved together. Colleagues inside one buying organisation share the requirement, so sharing an account inside your own company is expected rather than exceptional. What we ask is that the enquiries stay attached to a real requirement, because that is the only thing that keeps a price field open.

Do you qualify?

Check these before applying — it saves you a round trip:

How we handle your company data

Buyers ask this before they ask about price, so it belongs above the form:

• Not sold, not shared between buyers. Your enquiry goes to the factories we match for that requirement, and nowhere else.
• Not used as a demand signal to factories you did not ask us to approach.
• No marketing without a separate opt-in. A trade account is not a newsletter subscription.
• Confidential prices stay confidential. Quotation data is not published, and is not shown to other accounts.
• Deletion on request. Ask and we delete the account data; see the privacy notice.

What qualifies an account, and what does not?

• Qualifies: importers, distributors, private-label brands, retail chains buying to sell.
• Qualifies: buyers with a specification and a destination market.
• Does not qualify: requests for a factory contact list without an order intent.
• Does not qualify: resellers of supplier data.
• Does not qualify: applications without a verifiable business identity.

What are you agreeing to when you apply?

1. That you use factory identity to buy, not to resell as data.
2. That you keep the privacy notice terms for the details you send.
3. That you will tell us if a record turns out to be wrong.
4. That a quotation is between you and the factory; we coordinate, we do not underwrite it.

Where this sits in the process

This page is one topic out of the verification standard. The overview is Apply for a trade account, and the other topics on this page are listed there.