About
A closed network for professional electronics trade
We built The Trusted Source because buying stock from an unknown counterparty is a risk that a serious UK business should not have to take on every order.
Why a closed network
Open marketplaces optimise for listings. That works well for a consumer looking for a cheap pair of headphones, and badly for a procurement manager who needs 200 business laptops delivered to four sites with a VAT invoice and a warranty that survives contact with a supplier.
The Trusted Source takes the opposite position. We verify every company before it can trade, we keep the catalogue deliberately small, and we document each settled deal. It means fewer participants and a longer review — and it means a quotation from a member is something a finance director can sign off.
The company is registered in England and Wales and operates under UK GDPR. Membership is by application only: there is no open registration and no unverified listings anywhere in the catalogue.
The network in numbers
- 6 400+
- verified suppliers
- £2.4bn
- trade volume settled
- 1 200+
- product categories
- 98.4%
- on-time dispatch
Figures shown are 2026 year-to-date and rounded for presentation purposes.
How we operate
Four principles we do not trade away
01
Verification before listing
A company enters the catalogue only after its identity, trading capability and commercial standing have been checked against external sources.
02
A catalogue we keep small
We decline more applicants than we accept. A smaller catalogue means every listing carries weight, which is the only reason buyers trust it.
03
Documented, not implied
Invoices, delivery notes and contracts are held against each deal. If something goes wrong, the record already exists.
04
Named people, not tickets
Escalations reach a person who knows the account. Median first response to a sourcing request is six business hours.
How we started
The Trusted Source began with a procurement problem rather than a business idea. Two of our founders spent years buying stock for UK retailers and kept losing weeks to the same sequence: a supplier that looked credible, an order that went wrong, and no way to establish afterwards whether the counterparty had ever existed in the form they claimed.
The remedy was not a better search page. It was refusing to list anyone whose identity could not be confirmed, and recording enough detail about every trade that a dispute could be settled from the file rather than from memory.
That is still the whole business. We have grown the supplier base steadily since 2024, and we have kept the review standard unchanged while doing it.
Standards
What we hold ourselves to
- Supplier verification against Companies House, VAT records and trading history before listing.
- Annual re-verification, with automatic re-check on expired VAT numbers or address changes.
- UK GDPR and PECR compliance, described in full in our Privacy Notice.
- Written terms on every quotation; payment terms agreed per counterparty and shown before settlement.
- Documented dispute handling, with a named account contact for every escalation.
- Our verification standard is published openly — see how to verify an electronics supplier.
Membership
Join a catalogue that stays small
Applications are reviewed by a person. If your company trades in electronics or appliances, tell us what you buy or sell.
Member access only. Applications are reviewed by a person, not an automated score.