Three things that separate the suppliers whose products work hardest, and ten questions to find out whether you are one of them.
Every enquiry a supplier receives began as a decision made in front of a screen, by a distributor with limited time, comparing one product against several others. Sourcing City recorded 674,584 of those decisions in 2025, up 8.3 per cent on the year before.
This paper is about the 302 suppliers actively trading on the platform. Every one of them has already decided this market is worth investing in. They are not the problem, and they are not a cautionary tale. They are the suppliers doing the work, and the question is what separates them from each other.
Because something clearly does. Take the fifty largest of them. Collectively they hold 73.3 per cent of all products listed and take 73.2 per cent of all enquiries, which suggests attention simply follows shelf space. Look at them individually and that falls apart. The attention each earns relative to the shelf space it occupies varies seventeenfold. The strongest earns more than five times what its product count would predict. The weakest earns a third.
Same market. Same platform. Same level of commitment. Wildly different results. Something other than the number of products listed is deciding who gets found.
This paper examines what. The answer comes down to three things, all of them measurable, all of them decisions a supplier already makes without necessarily knowing they are making them.
Three marks of an intelligent supplier, and then ten questions to score yourself against them. See how many you can answer today. If you can answer all ten, you are doing something very few of your competitors are doing.
Not how many products they have. Which ones earn enquiries, which ones earn none, and what the difference costs them.
The measure is simple: how many enquiries does each individual product earn? Call it attention efficiency. Across the active suppliers, it falls sharply as ranges get bigger.
Median enquiries per product in 2025, by size of listed range.
Among suppliers with fewer than 25 products, the median is 20.3 enquiries per product. Among suppliers with 500 to 2,000, it is 4.0. Five times the attention per product.
This is not an argument for smaller ranges. A large range serves buyers a small one cannot, and the total volume it generates is real. Breadth buys volume. Focus buys efficiency. Neither is the wrong choice.
What the data shows is that the two pull against each other harder than the headline volume suggests, and that the trade off is measurable either way.
A supplier adding 600 lines to a 600 line range is not doubling their presence. They are doubling the number of products competing for a pool of attention that does not double with them, and doubling the volume of data that has to be kept accurate.
Enquiries per product. Not profit, not conversion, not margin. This paper has no visibility of those and makes no claim about them. A supplier running a large, low efficiency range may be doing so deliberately and profitably.
Range size explains part of the seventeenfold spread. It does not explain all of it, because suppliers in this cohort with near identical ranges sit at opposite ends of it. The second answer is a habit.
Comparing suppliers of similar range size, those whose product data arrives as a live structured feed record substantially more enquiries per product than those whose data does not.
Median enquiries per product, by range band and how the data arrives.
In the 200 to 1,000 band, enquiries per product are 89 per cent higher where the feed is live.
The tempting conclusion is that the feed produces the enquiries. The honest one is bigger. A data feed is not a cause. It is a marker of a supplier who has decided their product information is worth maintaining, and that decision tends to travel with other forms of commercial discipline.
A distributor working at speed selects what they can evaluate. A product whose price and availability cannot be checked without sending an email creates friction that a fully evaluable product does not.
We compared suppliers of roughly the same size, which is the fairest comparison the data allows. It is not an experiment. Every Dynamic Highway subscription started on the same day, 1 January 2026, so we cannot watch a single supplier before and after switching a feed on. And a supplier who invests in their product data is probably investing in other things too, so the feed may be a sign of a well run business rather than the reason for the enquiries. What we can say is that the two go together, in every range size we looked at.
The Data Rating is a score out of 100 measuring how much of the required product information is actually present: images, dimensions, materials, print areas, pricing, lead times and the rest. A supplier on an automated feed averages 74. A supplier submitting manually averages 54. The difference is method.
Twelve suppliers have not refreshed their product data in over three months. Every one of them submits manually. Not a single supplier on an automated feed appears on that list.
Every one of the 302 already pays to be on the platform. The third answer is what a supplier does beyond that: whether they choose to place particular products in front of buyers, or leave the catalogue to speak for itself.
In 2025, 65 of the 302 chose to go further. Just over one in five bought an enhanced entry, a featured placement, a new product slot, a special offer position or a search term placement, each of which is a spend over and above the listing itself. Of those 65, 34 committed for a full twelve months rather than buying around one season, and eleven rotated their placed products quarterly.
Across the catalogue, 1,528 products carried a paid placement of some kind during the year. That is 1.35 per cent of everything listed, and those products took 12 per cent of every enquiry recorded in 2025.
The other four in five chose to let their listings do the work. That is a legitimate decision, and many will be investing in visibility elsewhere, on their own site or with distributors directly. What this paper can speak to is what happens here, where the products a supplier places behave very differently from the ones they do not.
Compared with the average product in its own category, a placed product recorded a median of 4.6 times the enquiries in 2025. Across 1,361 placed products with a comparable category, 79 per cent beat their own category average.
The stronger test is the same product before and after. Enquiries are recorded per product for 2024 and 2025, so a product can be measured against its own previous year.
2025 enquiries as a multiple of the same product in 2024
950 placed products and 44,816 listing only products, each with recorded activity in both years.
Two thirds of placed products grew year on year. Barely a third of listing only products did. 65.7 per cent against 36.0 per cent, measured the same way on the same platform in the same year.
Measuring the same product before and after makes the pattern harder to dismiss, because the product is its own comparison. It still does not prove placement caused it. Suppliers choose which products to place and they choose the ones they believe in, so some of the difference was probably there already. These figures also cover this platform only, and say nothing about a supplier's sales team, exhibitions, email or distributor relationships.
Not a checklist of Sourcing City services. None of the ten names a product. They are drawn directly from the three marks above. See how many you can answer today.
Answer honestly. Nothing is recorded and nothing is sent anywhere.
Three conclusions are carried by the data in this paper.
The fifty largest suppliers collectively receive the attention their share of products would predict. Individually, what they earn relative to the shelf space they occupy varies seventeenfold. The average describes almost nobody.
Median enquiries per product falls from 20.3 among suppliers listing under 25 products to 4.0 among those listing 500 to 2,000. Both are legitimate strategies, and the trade off between them is measurable.
Enquiries per product run 89 per cent higher where the data feed is live. Products a supplier pays to place earn 4.6 times the average product in their own category. Only just over one in five active suppliers chose paid placement.
The single takeaway. Buyer attention in this market is finite, and 302 committed suppliers are competing for it. The encouraging finding is that it is not handed out by size, by history, or by the number of products a supplier carries. Range, data and placement are all decisions, all three are measurable, and suppliers who make them deliberately look different in this data from suppliers who do not.
Performance in this market is not destiny. It is a set of decisions, and every one of them can be measured.
This paper draws on platform activity generated by distributor behaviour across the UK and Ireland promotional merchandise market. A Click Through Enquiry is recorded when a distributor actively selects an individual product from a search results page containing multiple items. The supplier then receives an automatic report naming the distributor company, the individual and their contact details. It represents genuine sales intent rather than passive browsing.
Enquiry figures cover the 2025 calendar year unless stated otherwise. Range size, product counts and data quality measures are current as at September 2026. Supplier placement figures cover the 2025 calendar year. The seventeenfold spread is calculated as each supplier's share of all enquiries divided by its share of all products listed, across the fifty largest suppliers by enquiry volume. Enquiry totals include all subscription tiers. Product count is 95,000 live products, discontinued lines excluded. The active supplier count is 302 suppliers trading on the platform. Paid placement covers the 65 suppliers who purchased placement during 2025, and the 1,528 products carrying an enhanced entry, featured placement, new product slot, special offer position or search term placement. The Data Rating is a score out of 100 measuring how much of the required product information is present.
Four limits apply throughout and are stated so that no finding is read as more than it is. The data feed comparison is an association observed between comparable suppliers, not a controlled test, and cannot establish cause. Efficiency throughout means attention per product, not economic return, and no cost, conversion or margin data was available. The paid placement findings cover placement on this platform only, and cannot remove selection because suppliers choose which products to place. The seventeenfold spread describes a range and does not establish why any individual supplier sits where it does.
Commercial interest. Sourcing City provides commercial product data and visibility services to suppliers, and therefore has a commercial interest in the subject matter of marks two and three, including the placement products discussed in mark three. Readers should weigh those sections with that in mind. The limits above apply regardless, and no finding has been softened or strengthened on commercial grounds.
Individual supplier performance is not identified anywhere in this paper. All supplier level findings are reported in aggregate.