Electronics Sourcing invited Victor Meijers of TrustedParts.com to update readers on its latest features and functions designed to help purchasing professionals source genuine parts
Q. Why is it so important to TrustedParts.com that buyers get genuine parts from only authorized sources?
A. When inventory aggregation sites first emerged, no distinction was made between authorized distributors and non-authorized sources. This opened users of these sites to the risk of unknowingly procuring components that were counterfeit or had not been handled or stored properly—and many other issues. TrustedParts.com was developed for the express purpose of giving users confidence they were sourcing genuine electronic components, fully warrantied and supported by the manufacturers from only their authorized distributors.
Q. How do you ensure only genuine parts from authorized sources are advertised on your site?
A. While some inventory aggregation sites now indicate when a distributor claims to be authorized for a given product, only TrustedParts.com requires actual proof of authorization. This proof must be provided for each region a distributor participates in on Trustedparts.com. These proofs are stored in our system and are periodically re-verified. Through the Manufacturer Portal on TrustedParts.com, manufacturers can even set the authorization statuses for distributors directly themselves.
Q. Does restricting data to authorized sources mean buyers miss out on components that are obsolete or difficult to find?
A. No. There is a common misconception that the authorized channel only stocks components that are currently the most popular. In fact, the TrustedParts.com database has price and availability information for over 24 million unique part numbers from over 4,000 manufacturers, ranging from the latest technologies to components that have been manufactured for decades. Several participating distributors even specialize in working directly with manufacturers to stock their end-of-life and obsolete components.
Q. Are there any features you’d like to highlight for readers?
A. Our BOM tool, which allows searches of up to 100 part numbers at a time, now lets users filter the results in many different ways, configure their download, and in some cases, upload results into a distributor’s shopping cart.
Registered users can store their BOMs for later use, share them with other designated users and request access to the Extended BOM tool which allows searches of up to 1,000 parts simultaneously. With an account, users can also set up stock and price alerts to monitor their most critical components.
We have also put a lot of effort into data integrity and clarity. We recently reorganized and standardized how we display our pricing and availability information, with price breaks, lead times, on-order quantities and displaying the age of the data in cases where it is not real-time.
Customers also have the option to automate their quoting process by integrating our API into their ERP/quoting tool. Since TrustedParts.com is funded by the site’s sponsors and other participating distributors, all these features are free to our users.
www.trustedparts.com