Building the Electronic Components Industry’s E-commerce Marketplace

When Jens Gamperl surveyed the electronic component industry in 2015, he noticed that distribution hadn’t really changed much in roughly three decades, even though technology had advanced. Historically, gathering pricing information for electronic components was cumbersome and time-consuming. The process required mailing component specifications to various distributors and asking for a quote, which could take up to two weeks to receive. More recently, sourcing involved visiting multiple distributor websites, logging in, and then paying through each site individually to amass all the parts needed for an electronic product.

Gamperl took matters into his own hands and revolutionized this process with Sourcengine™, the electronic component marketplace he and his team at Sourceability North America, LLC built. “On Sourcengine, users can search or upload their parts list, receive real-time offers, and check out in one convenient process–cutting the lead time down from two weeks to seconds,” says Gamperl, Sourceability’s CEO. On the flip side, “suppliers can make their products globally available, using our technology to facilitate transactions,” he says.

A CONCIERGE SERVICE

In the $500 billion market, which Gamperl estimates consists of about 6,000 manufacturers, Sourceability offers more than 1 billion parts along with a comprehensive set of tools and services for easy purchase by customers–more like a concierge service, he says. Those component parts range “from a display, to a chip, to a resistor,” he says. “We sell any kind of electronic components”–whatever goes into an electronic product. To reach their customers globally, Sourceability has warehouses in Hong Kong, Singapore, and at its logistics center in Miami.

To date, Sourceability is the only company in the industry that has invested in building a proprietary online marketplace. Despite the substantial resources originally required to design, build, and launch Sourcengine four years ago, the system has more than paid for itself in the thousands of customers it serves each month. The volume is so high that Gamperl admits, “We could not reach these customers without our marketplace.”

EXPERIENCED HUMAN CAPITAL

Gamperl credits much of the company’s success to the “more than 350 people who work for Sourceability today, many of whom worked with me in previous companies.” The advantage of having worked together and understanding each other’s mentality and work ethic, coupled with “a commitment to doing things differently for customers,” sets Sourceability’s culture and achievements apart from the crowd, Gamperl says. “Mix good people with good ideas and good development of technology, and I think that’s the recipe for success,” he adds.