Closing cross-yard deals four times faster on the Marketplace

A broker doing six to ten cross-yard trades a week, every one of them assembled by hand: email chain to gauge interest, a phone call to agree price, a PDF contract drafted in Word, a wire instruction by SMS, and a logistics call to arrange the pickup. Each trade took a day or two of back-and-forth before any material moved.

The bigger problem was discovery. They knew only the counterparties they had already worked with. Lots that did not fit one of those few buyers sat on the dock.

They started publishing surplus lots to the Scraplytics Marketplace — material, grade, quantity, photos, asking price (or a 48-hour auction). Buyers from outside their usual network started bidding within minutes. When the seller accepted a bid or offer, a tracked deal opened, the seller's Sales Order and the buyer's Purchase Order were drafted automatically, and the buyer settled either through the gateway or by recording a bank-transfer reference.

The instant payment cleared, a delivery dispatch was created in the seller's yard. Both sides got a signed-style confirmation PDF by email and could rate each other afterwards.

Average cycle from first interest to a contracted deal collapsed from roughly two days to four hours — the same trades, just without the email-tag. Auction lots routinely attracted around a dozen bids, several of them from yards the broker had not done business with before.

Operationally, the biggest unlock was zero double-entry: a contract no longer meant somebody re-typing the lot into the SO module and again into the buyer's PO module. The audit trail (who bid, who accepted, who paid, who delivered) sat in one timeline on the deal.

Trust scores became their own marketing — repeat buyers gravitated to high-rated sellers, which pulled the network toward the brokers running clean operations.