Sourceability LLC launched in 2015 with founder and CEO Jens Gamperl’s grand idea of connecting industrial buyers with the world’s electronic component manufacturers and distributors.
Gamperl’s goal: to use his team of electronics supply chain experts to research dozens of web portals worldwide to find buyers the best deals.
But making that system work proved to come at enormous effort and cost. “In order to generate 50 to 100 orders, Sourceability’s employees would quote up to 100,000 articles from 100 to 200 different suppliers,” the company says. Moreover, “since prices and availabilities in the electronics market change rather dynamically, the price information often was out of date shortly after” Sourceability forwarded it to its customers.
But that was before Sourceability launched its own e-commerce portal.
“Sourceability’s idea was to bring visibility to the market in real time” for buyers, Gemperl tells B2BecNews. “So we developed our own marketplace.”
Sourceability launched Sourcengine.com in October. The portal lets buyers search for about 550 million items among electronic components, including information on replacement parts for SKUs that are no longer in production.
A search results page on the site lets buyers compare prices and availability of inventory. Sourceability ships orders from one of its three warehouses in Miami, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Sourceability, which is based in Doral, Florida, and employs about 300 people, operates 10 other office locations from Texas to Hong Kong.
To build Sourcengine.com, it worked with Germany-based web design and development firm Turbine Kreuzberg, which built the site on the Spryker Commerce OS e-commerce technology platform. To address the challenge of searching for products among a database of more than 500 million items, Turbine Kreuzberg deployed a Lucene-based site search engine known as Elasticsearch.
Sourceability earns its revenue through commissions on sales. Suppliers pay fees ranging from 3-5% to about 15%, depending on transaction volume. Average order values for Sourceability’s core customers run between $6,000 and $8,000, though many orders have a far smaller average value, Gemperl says.
The company did about $170 million in revenue last year, and expects to report substantial growth in 2018, Gamperl says.
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