In this article
VendorStocks is the wrong choice if you need same-day delivery, if you sell a handful of fast-moving lines, if your trade runs almost entirely on negotiated credit and long relationships, or if you need somebody to help you specify a part before you can buy it. Below is what we would point you towards instead in each case.
We would rather lose the signup than take a monthly subscription from a business the platform does not suit. A seller who churns in month two costs us more in reputation than he ever paid us in fees, and in this trade reputation travels faster than advertising.
If you need it today
Nothing on VendorStocks ships from our shelf. Sellers dispatch from their own godowns, and however good the platform gets, that is a day at minimum and usually longer.
If your panel is being wired tomorrow morning and you are one contactor short, do not open a laptop. Drive to your dealer. If you are in Bengaluru and stuck, call the Skylights counter in Bommanahalli — a physical shop with physical stock, and a completely different thing from the marketplace.
We are not going to build same-day delivery for electrical components across India and we are not going to pretend we are close to it. Urgency belongs to whoever is nearest to you.
If you sell thirty fast-moving lines
If your business is a tight range and every one of your customers already has your mobile number, a seller subscription will not pay for itself, and we would rather say that now than take three months of fees finding out.
That is already an efficient business. The phone rings, you know what he wants before he finishes the sentence, and the order is done in ninety seconds. Software does not improve that. It adds a step to it.
The platform starts earning its keep in two situations. One, your catalogue is wide enough that buyers discover items they did not know you carried — a discovery problem, which a listing solves. Two, your quotations, purchase orders and invoices currently live in four different places and reconciliation is costing you real hours every month — a workflow problem, which a system solves. Thirty lines and a phone that rings is neither.
Do not let anybody, ourselves included, sell you software for a problem you do not have.
If your trade runs on credit and relationships
Some of the best electrical businesses in this city operate almost entirely on trust and ninety-day terms, with paperwork that follows the goods rather than leading them. The order is placed on a call, the goods move the same week, the documents catch up, and nobody has been let down in eleven years.
A platform built around a documented sequence — RFQ, quotation, purchase order, proforma, invoice, payment, in that order — is a poor fit for that way of working. Forcing it in means doing the work twice: once the way you actually trade, and again to make the system agree with you.
Our honest advice is to stay as you are until the record-keeping starts costing you money. You will know when it does, because it will arrive as a dispute you cannot win rather than as an inconvenience. A supplier disputes a short delivery from four months ago and there is nothing to point at. A buyer’s accounts team holds a payment because the invoice does not match a purchase order that was never issued. That is the moment. Not before.
If you need somebody to size it for you
The assistant on the platform will find you a part and tell you what stock exists against it. It will not size a capacitor bank against your load profile, it will not calculate your fault level, and it will not tell you whether the MCCB you are looking at is adequate for the board it is going into.
If you are buying with a specification still open, you want a person who has specified panels. Call ours on the Skylights number, or call the dealer who has been supplying your site for years. Both are faster than a search box and both are more likely to be right.
We would genuinely rather you did that than have you buy the wrong device from us and discover it at commissioning.
If you want the largest possible buyer audience tomorrow
We are a young marketplace. A handful of brands, a few thousand listings, and a buyer base that is growing rather than grown.
If your single objective is volume of eyeballs this quarter, a horizontal marketplace has more buyers than we do and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. What you trade for that reach is margin and the buyer relationship — on most of those platforms you become a supplier to the platform rather than a seller with customers of your own.
That is a real trade-off with a real answer on both sides, and which side you take depends on whether you are trying to move stock or build a book of buyers.
If you are buying for your home
⟨This section needs your decision first — see the note at the top of this file. Two honest options: state plainly that the platform is for registered businesses and point individual buyers to retail channels, or build the consumer route and describe it here. Whichever you choose, the site copy and the Terms have to say the same thing before this publishes.⟩
The short version
| If this is you | Why we’re a poor fit | Try instead |
|---|---|---|
| You need it this afternoon | Sellers dispatch from their own locations | Your local dealer, or the Skylights counter in Bengaluru |
| You sell thirty fast-moving lines | A subscription costs more than it returns at that range | Keep doing what works; revisit when the catalogue widens |
| You trade on credit and relationships | Our flow is documented and sequential | Stay as you are until record-keeping costs you money |
| You need the part specified first | The assistant finds parts, it does not select them | Call an engineer — ours or your dealer’s |
| You want maximum reach this quarter | We are young and our audience is growing | A horizontal marketplace, accepting the margin trade-off |
Who it does fit
Briefly, and then we will stop.
Buyers with a repeat requirement and a settled specification, who want price, stock and documents in writing without a phone call. Buyers comparing brands before committing. Buyers whose finance team is tired of reconciling invoices against chat threads.
Sellers with a catalogue wide enough that discovery matters, who already quote well but lose deals somewhere between the quotation and the purchase order, and who want that whole sequence in one place with the documents attached.
That is genuinely it. If you recognised yourself in the earlier sections rather than this one, you have saved yourself a subscription and we have saved ourselves a churn, and both are good outcomes.
Why we published this
Two reasons, and neither is modesty.
The first is that we have been on the buying side of this trade since 2013 and we know what it feels like to be sold something that did not fit. The vendor knew. He let it happen because the sale was in front of him. We have not forgotten how that felt and we are not interested in doing it to somebody else.
The second is practical. A platform that fits badly generates support load, refund requests, and a person telling other people in the trade that it did not work. Bengaluru’s electrical market is smaller than it looks and everybody eventually talks to everybody. Filtering the fit upfront is cheaper than fixing it afterwards.
If you have read this far and are still not sure which side of the line you are on, write to us and describe your business. We will tell you honestly, including when the answer is no.
Related reading: Buying electrical components online: when it works and when to still call · How to sell electrical products online in India · How to verify an electrical supplier before your first order
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