The agent takes a buy-side brief — product, volume, destination, certifications — surfaces three verified Asian factories (Mercatora's directory + live web discovery), runs due diligence on each (registry, sanctions, adverse media, financials, web presence), drafts the RFQ email with the factories pre-attached as recipients, and computes landed cost into the destination port with HS classification and destination duty + VAT. End-to-end in about seven minutes.

Alibaba is a search engine over a self-listed catalogue — the buyer carries the full burden of verifying, qualifying, computing landed cost and absorbing the risk when any of it goes wrong. Mercatora is an agent that does that research work for African importers who don't have Chinese-language access, verification tools, or a corridor network of their own. Narrow buyer segment, narrow geographic scope, high-touch verification instead of broad self-serve.

They often do — and get burned when a factory doesn't actually make the product in the brief, doesn't hold the certifications it claims, or quotes a price that excludes duty and lands 20% higher than expected. The agent eliminates those three failure modes before the buyer commits anything. On a $50k order, avoiding one of those misses pays for the agent fee several times over.

A monthly subscription, no commission. You can start on the free plan; Pro costs €49 a month and Team €149 a month for importers running more briefs. We take no cut of the deals you close, suppliers pay no listing fees, and there are no paid rankings: the agent surfaces factories by fit, not by payment.

Three layers, re-run on every agent run instead of just at onboarding: (1) registry check against the national company registry for the factory's country, (2) sanctions and adverse-media screen (OFAC, EU, UN consolidated lists, major press), (3) financial signals and web-presence check. Any directory supplier that would fail current checks is downgraded automatically; the shortlist never surfaces something stale.

Because that's where the broker markup gap is widest and the founder has the first-hand network to serve it. African importers routinely pay 15–25% markup to local sourcing brokers for information those brokers get for free from their Asian contacts. Mercatora replaces the broker's information advantage with structured research. Starting narrow lets us build real trust in a tight corridor community before expanding to other lanes.

The agent drafts the RFQ with the three vetted factories as recipients and surfaces their real contact emails. The buyer sends the RFQ from their own inbox. When replies come in the buyer pastes them back; the agent extracts the quote structure (unit price, MOQ, lead time, Incoterms, payment terms), computes landed cost per factory with HS classification + destination duty + VAT, and surfaces the lowest-landed-cost offer as its recommendation. The buyer approves and executes directly with the factory of their choice.

Felice Krattinger — solo founder based in Germany. Previous career in B2B sales at Keyence, the Japanese industrial-automation group known for one of the most disciplined customer-discovery cultures in B2B. Before writing any product code, Felice ran dozens of structured interviews with African importers and spent 4–6 months matching them manually through her own corridor network: 10 unpaid matches as discovery, 2 paid contracts activated October 2026 (pharma and software), 90 suppliers independently registered interest. Mercatora is that manual process, running as software.