Supplier discovery

Today, the path from “this product looks good in Hilal” to “I have three quotes from suppliers” is manual: you copy the ASIN, search AliExpress / Alibaba / DHgate / your supplier directory, evaluate prices, contact suppliers.

Supplier discovery brings that workflow into Hilal directly.

What this will let you do

• From any product detail page, see a list of suppliers who likely supply that product (or close equivalents).
• For each supplier, see their listed price, MOQ (minimum order quantity), shipping options, and platform reputation.
• Sort suppliers by total landed cost — supplier price + estimated shipping + estimated import duties — to find the actually-cheapest option.
• Compare suppliers side by side — a comparison table showing pricing, MOQ, lead time estimates.
• Save supplier candidates to the product’s watchlist row as part of your sourcing notes.
• Get an updated margin sub-score — once you pick a supplier, the SellerScore recalculates with that supplier’s actual price as the COGS.

This is the cross-product feature that makes Hilal’s product research immediately actionable. Researching a product without supplier visibility is half the work.

Why this matters

The sourcing gap is where most product-research-to-launch flows die. Sellers find a great-scoring product, but:

• The COGS estimate (today: from Hilal’s benchmark table) might be conservative; the real supplier cost might be much better, making margin much higher.
• Or the COGS estimate might be optimistic; real suppliers price the product 30% higher, making margin too thin.
• Either way, the SellerScore’s margin sub-score is informational until you have a real quote.

Supplier discovery closes that gap. You see the actual supplier prices in Hilal, recalculate the margin in real time, and either commit or move on.

How it’ll work (preview)

Supplier discovery layers on top of Cross-platform pricing (Crawlee). The flow:

1. Open a product detail.
2. Click “Find suppliers.” (Or it’s a section that’s pre-populated below the Amazon listing detail.)
3. Crawlee scans known supplier marketplaces — AliExpress, Alibaba, DHgate, 1688, IndiaMart, plus a curated database of OEM directories.
4. Hilal matches the Amazon product to candidate supplier listings using image similarity, title matching, and category matching.
5. For each candidate supplier, Hilal pulls:
   • Listed unit price.
   • MOQ.
   • Shipping options (with rough estimates if shipping isn’t listed).
   • Platform reputation (e.g., Alibaba Gold Supplier badge, AliExpress seller rating).
   • Estimated lead time (where available).
6. You see them in a sortable table.

When you select a candidate supplier, the product detail’s margin sub-score recomputes using that supplier’s price as the COGS.

Verification challenges

Supplier discovery is harder than scraping prices. Specifically:

• Image / title matching. A supplier listing for “bamboo socks 5-pack” needs to match (or not match) the Amazon listing. False positives are worse than false negatives.
• MOQ realism. Some Alibaba suppliers list aspirational MOQ (1 unit) but in practice won’t fulfill below 500. We’ll need to flag this.
• Reputation aggregation. Each platform has its own reputation system; we need to normalize.
• Counterfeit / brand risk. Some matches are “this AliExpress listing is the actual product, just unbranded” and some are “this is a knockoff.” We need to surface the difference.
• Verified vs. listed. A supplier listing’s price isn’t always the price you’ll actually be quoted. We’re evaluating ways to indicate “verified-via-quote” vs. “listed-only.”

We’re going to ship this iteratively — start with high-precision matches even at the cost of recall, then expand.

Use cases this unlocks

• Sourcing-led research. Sort by cross-platform leverage descending to find products where Amazon premium is high vs. supplier price.
• Multi-supplier sourcing. For each shortlisted product, line up 3–5 supplier quotes for negotiation leverage before reaching out.
• Supplier comparison across products. “Which products on my watchlist do supplier X actually carry?”
• Brand risk filtering. Flag products whose top supplier matches are knockoffs, so you avoid commitment.

Status

• Concept and design: in progress.
• Backend matching engine: depends on Crawlee being live (Run 3 — see Cross-platform pricing).
• UI: Run 4+ (after Crawlee).
• Beta: planned post-Run-3, pending Crawlee rollout.

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